A Best Book of 2020 (NPR)
A Best Book of 2020 (The Economist)
A Top Ten Best Science Book of 2020 (Smithsonian)
A Best Science and Technology Book of 2020 (Library Journal)
A Must-Read Book to Escape the Chaos of 2020 (Newsweek)
Starred review (Booklist)
Starred review (Publishers Weekly)
A historically unprecedented disconnect between humanity and the heavens
has opened. Jo Marchant's book can begin to heal it.
For at least 20,000 years, we have led not just an earthly existence but
a cosmic one. Celestial cycles drove every aspect of our daily lives.
Our innate relationship with the stars shaped who we are--our art,
religious beliefs, social status, scientific advances, and even our
biology. But over the last few centuries we have separated ourselves
from the universe that surrounds us. It's a disconnect with a dire cost.
Our relationship to the stars and planets has moved from one of awe,
wonder and superstition to one where technology is king--the cosmos is
now explored through data on our screens, not by the naked eye observing
the natural world. Indeed, in most countries, modern light pollution
obscures much of the night sky from view. Jo Marchant's spellbinding
parade of the ways different cultures celebrated the majesty and
mysteries of the night sky is a journey to the most awe-inspiring view
you can ever see: looking up on a clear dark night. That experience and
the thoughts it has engendered have radically shaped human civilization
across millennia. The cosmos is the source of our greatest creativity in
art, in science, in life.
To show us how, Jo Marchant takes us to the Hall of the Bulls in the
caves at Lascaux in France, and to the summer solstice at a
5,000-year-old tomb at Newgrange, Ireland. We discover Chumash cosmology
and visit medieval monks grappling with the nature of time and Tahitian
sailors navigating by the stars. We discover how light reveals the
chemical composition of the sun, and we are with Einstein as he works
out that space and time are one and the same. A four-billion-year-old
meteor inspires a search for extraterrestrial life. The cosmically
liberating, summary revelation is that star-gazing made us human.
