DESTINATION MARS:
In Art, Myth and Science
By Martin Caidin and Jay Barbree, with Susan Wright
Penguin Studio, 228 pages, $29.95
MERLIN’S TOUR OF THE UNIVERSE:
A Skywatcher’s Guide to Everything From Mars and Quasars to Comets, Planets, Blue Moons and Werewolves
By Neil de Grasse Tyson
Doubleday, 299 pages, $12.95 paper
The plucky Pathfinder spacecraft and its six-wheeled sidekick Sojourner are spending their summer vacation on Mars and bragging about it to us folks stuck at home.
Pathfinder has been showering us with vacation snapshots, panoramas of the austere Martian landscape. Meanwhile, Sojourner has been crawling around the Martian surface checking out rocks named “Scooby-Doo” and “Barnacle Bill” and filing dispatches about their composition. These antics have drawn record crowds to computer Web sites created to chronicle the mission.
But eons before Pathfinder, people had to look up–not hook up–to understand the cosmos. Against the velvety blackness of the night that modern light pollution has washed away, Mars burned an unblinking red, a frightening light that seared itself into the human psyche. It is this Mars, compelling and unreachable, that propels the lavishly illustrated “Destination Mars,” by Martin Caidin, Jay Barbree and Susan Wright.
Their book opens with an account of Orson Welles’ 1938 “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast about attacking Martians. The story is familiar, although some details, such as the coincidental appearance of meteorites in the sky that night, provide a more nuanced understanding of the mass panic that ensued. What will be new for many, however, are the beautiful illustrations, engravings and newspaper photos that accompany the account.
From the familiar, the book hops a time machine to the past, exploring the ways Mars was regarded by the ancient Babylonians, Greeks and Romans. The tour is interesting, but in places regrettably brief.
The mention, for example, in just one sentence of Babylonian astronomy, Babylonian culture, the Euphrates and the Bronze Age can leave a reader feeling that a course in early civilizations is in order. As is true in every chapter, however, the photographs and illustrations are riveting.
After a stop in the Middle Ages to explore Christianity’s vague interest in Mars–the church did not exactly promote scientific inquiry–it’s on to the Renaissance. Significant players of the 14th and 15th Centuries garner only fleeting mention, but this isn’t a book to be read for its depth. The illustrations in this section are among the most compelling–ceiling frescoes, engravings of key scientific figures, paintings of Mars personified.
The last half of the book focuses on modern times. It opens at the dawn of the Industrial Age in the 19th Century, when people began to think of life existing on another planet as a real possibility, and not just a satirical venue for examining life on Earth.
An especially engaging chapter on the post-World War II “golden age of Mars” evokes that era through brief stories, movie posters and stills. And the book is current, with mention of NASA’s announcement last summer that a meteorite from Mars is thought to harbor microscopic traces of fossilized life.
The illustrations that were so compelling during the first half of the book are a tad less powerful in the second half, perhaps because some are the familiar fare of newspapers and magazines. Overall, however, “Destination Mars” is a visual treat depicting how the human imagination has embellished what for so long was nothing more than a tiny red dot in a big, dark sky.
“Merlin’s Tour of the Universe,” by Neil de Grasse Tyson, offers a different take on the cosmos, one that relies more on words than pictures to evoke awe and instill a sense that science is fun.
The book is sprinkled with simple but informative line drawings, as well as more numerous and humorous cartoon-like sketches. But unlike “Destination Mars,” this is not a picture book. It is, instead, akin to a transcript of a chat with a very old and knowledgeable friend, one named Merlin.
Born nearly 5 billion years ago (and surely sipping from the Fountain of Youth somewhere in the universe, not to mention eating five daily servings of fruits and vegetables), Merlin is a visitor from the Andromeda galaxy.
This fictional character answers real questions from real people. Most of the questions originally appeared in a column in Star Date, an astronomy magazine published by McDonald Observatory at the University of Texas at Austin. There’s Jonathan in San Diego, for example, who asks what would happen if Earth stopped rotating (for one thing, “we would all fall over and roll due east at about 800 miles per hour”). Benny in Oklahoma worries about what would happen if he fell into a black hole (the short answer: “You won’t be having fun”).
And Amy from Chicago wonders, “Does the full moon affect people’s behavior?” (Yes, Merlin concedes, more babies are born and more burglaries committed during full moons. But he offers explanations so logical that surely they could only have been written when the moon was not full.)
Fortunate enough to have been pals with some of history’s great thinkers, such as Leonardo da Vinci and Albert Einstein, Merlin recounts some of their conversations in his answers.
The book is not a cosmological canon, an accounting of what a stargazing scientist has decided mere mortals should know. Limiting its scope to questions asked by readers leaves some gaps in the topics covered. But the volume is fun and may rekindle that sense of wonder about the universe that city lights helped to extinguish years ago.
