Skip to main content

The Book of the Moon – Rick Stroud ***

Don’t get the idea that this is a bad book because it only gets three stars. It’s an excellent compendium of information about our nearest and most spectacular (if you don’t count the sun) heavenly body.
The book is divided into sections, beginning with a general facts section, before going onto an ‘astronomers’ section that takes us through the timeline from the very first possible recordings of the moon in prehistoric carvings to observations from the Apollo missions. Some sections are better that others. One called ‘Gardening and the Weather’ for example smacks a little of desperation, going into the weird ideas of biodynamics at considerably more length than this fringe concept deserves. By contrast, the book finishes with a delightful selection called miscellany that pulls together all sorts of odds and sods from moon-oriented cocktails to moon hoaxes and musical references. It’s no wonder there’s a comment from Ben Schott of Schott’s Miscellany on the front.
Delightful though that final chapter is, it brings out the real flaw in this book and the reason it only scores three stars – it’s almost impossible to read from cover to cover. It’s a dip-in book, and as such struggles to live up to the label of popular science. Given its nature I’d have liked to have seen more illustrations. There are two sets of good colour plates, but it could be argued that a book like this – almost Dorling Kindersley style – needs to be illustrated throughout.
Apparently it’s the UNESCO Year of Astronomy, marking 400 years since Galileo’s first recorded astronomical observations, plus the fortieth anniversary of the first manned moon landings, so the book is certainly timely. It’s by no means a bad effort, but I’d love to see a proper, well written popular science narrative book on the subject.

Hardback:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you   
Review by Jo Reed
Labels:

Comments

  1. Unknown5 October 2019 at 20:30

    Rick Stroud makes a statement on the history channel stating that the the reason the moon has phases is because the earth blocks the sunlight to it. Hopefully he now knows how incorrect that is. What he's describing is a lunar eclipse. The phases of the moon happen because of earth's point of view. If the moon is illuminated from one side, we only see half of the moon illuminated. So if the moon is closer in the sky to the sun then we may see only a sliver of it.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Brian Clegg6 October 2019 at 00:19

      As this commenter has not given any detail of the source, we can't check it. Obviously the commenter is correct about the lunar eclipse and cause of the moon's phases. If the assertion about the phases being caused by the earth blocking sunlight had been made in the book, I would expect our reviewer to have picked it up. I do note that Mr Stroud is a historian, not a scientist, and if the History Channel comment was in an interview, it is easy to say something incorrect under pressure.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Roger Highfield - Stephen Hawking: genius at work interview

Roger Highfield OBE is the Science Director of the Science Museum Group. Roger has visiting professorships at the Department of Chemistry, UCL, and at the Dunn School, University of Oxford, is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and a member of the Medical Research Council and Longitude Committee. He has written or co-authored ten popular science books, including two bestsellers. His latest title is Stephen Hawking: genius at work . Why science? There are three answers to this question, depending on context: Apollo; Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, along with the world’s worst nuclear accident at Chernobyl; and, finally, Nullius in verba . Growing up I enjoyed the sciencey side of TV programmes like Thunderbirds and The Avengers but became completely besotted when, in short trousers, I gazed up at the moon knowing that two astronauts had paid it a visit. As the Apollo programme unfolded, I became utterly obsessed. Today, more than half a century later, the moon landings are
Post a Comment
Read more

Space Oddities - Harry Cliff *****

In this delightfully readable book, Harry Cliff takes us into the anomalies that are starting to make areas of physics seems to be nearing a paradigm shift, just as occurred in the past with relativity and quantum theory. We start with, we are introduced to some past anomalies linked to changes in viewpoint, such as the precession of Mercury (explained by general relativity, though originally blamed on an undiscovered planet near the Sun), and then move on to a few examples of apparent discoveries being wrong: the BICEP2 evidence for inflation (where the result was caused by dust, not the polarisation being studied),  the disappearance of an interesting blip in LHC results, and an apparent mistake in the manipulation of numbers that resulted in alleged discovery of dark matter particles. These are used to explain how statistics plays a part, and the significance of sigmas . We go on to explore a range of anomalies in particle physics and cosmology that may indicate either a breakdown i
Post a Comment
Read more

Splinters of Infinity - Mark Wolverton ****

Many of us who read popular science regularly will be aware of the 'great debate' between American astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis in 1920 over whether the universe was a single galaxy or many. Less familiar is the clash in the 1930s between American Nobel Prize winners Robert Millikan and Arthur Compton over the nature of cosmic rays. This not a book about the nature of cosmic rays as we now understand them, but rather explores this confrontation between heavyweight scientists. Millikan was the first in the fray, and often wrongly named in the press as discoverer of cosmic rays. He believed that this high energy radiation from above was made up of photons that ionised atoms in the atmosphere. One of the reasons he was determined that they should be photons was that this fitted with his thesis that the universe was in a constant state of creation: these photons, he thought, were produced in the birth of new atoms. This view seems to have been primarily driven by re
Post a Comment
Read more