Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2014 -

Black holes have always captured the imaginations of astronomy students, who often want to follow up with more reading on the topic.  There are many books to recommend that focus on the exotic physics of these objects and present modern understanding of their properties and behavior.  However, the historical debates over black holes are just as fascinating as the science behind these strange astronomical phenomena.  Even as more and more eminent physicists and astronomers calculated that these unique objects were possible in theory, black holes were continuously discounted as impossibilities that simply could not exist.  In this book, Bartusiak (MIT) presents an exhaustively researched history of the development of understanding these infinitely dense objects from Newton's work on gravity through Hawking's discovery of their ability to radiate.  The story does not include just the development of scientific understanding; Bartusiak also examines how the personalities involved, including Newton, Einstein, Schwarzschild, Chandrasekhar, Zwicky, Landau, Wheeler, and others, contributed to pushing understanding forward.  Bartusiak's description of the context in which each scientist worked makes this book stand apart from the volumes on black holes that have come before.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.

InCelestial Shadows, Westfall (Association of Lunar Planetary Observers) and Sheehan (science historian/writer) have undertaken a unique and challenging task: to summarize all the ways in which observational astronomers and planetary scientists use eclipses, transits, and occultations to study distant objects.  They review the history of these observations in detail, provide practical advice for making observations of these phenomena, and discuss the modern research still being done when these events occur.  This 22-chapter book collects in one place such a tremendous amount of information that it will be very useful, in particular, to those who wish to learn about how these events have previously allowed and continue to allow scientists to study solar system objects in unique ways.  Given the ambitious nature of such a task, it is understandable that the authors touch only lightly  on modern observations of exoplanet transits, but those are treated in a final, short chapter.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries.

The title refers to a paradox famously stated by physicist Enrico Fermi.  This is a revision of the authors 2002 book (CH, Mar'03, 40-3987) in which he proposed 50 solutions to the paradox; here he lists 75.  They fall into three general categories: "They Are (or Were) Here, They Exist, But We Have Yet to See or Hear from Them, and They Dont Exist.  There are 397 notes and 21 pages of references.  The arguments are engaging, clearly reasoned, and accessible to general readers.  There are many wonderful quotes (Chance is perhaps Gods pseudonym when he does not want to signAnatole France) and anecdotes (a giant African snail pulling a DVD could exceed all current last mile communications technologies in efficiency).  As with all excellent books on extraterrestrial intelligence, readers gain greater insight into what being human means (Were searching for ourselves).  Physicist Webb concludes that humans may well be the only civilization in the galaxy, a possibility that Astronomer Royal Martin Rees describes in the foreword as entitling humans to be less cosmically modest.  This is one of the best books ever written on the subject of extraterrestrial intelligence.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readership levels.

The present moment is one of the few times in the last half century when the US has had no human launch capability.  NASA is dependent on Russian space vehicles to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station.  The last three flights of the space shuttle were in February, May, and July of 2011.  Dean (English, Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville) attended these launches and here describes her personal feelings and observations about the end of the shuttle era (which started in 1981).  She discusses her friendship with a NASA worker who directed her to some insider information on the space shuttle and on launch preparations.  Included are observations on how political vagaries affect NASA's ability to effectively conduct space exploration.  The author intersperses her evocative commentaries with words of various seminal writers (e.g., Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe) and stories from the heroic era of spaceflight, the 1960s.  The overall feeling of the book is one of sadness about the end of an important part of recent US history.  One of the best recent treatments of the US space program this reviewer has read, this book comes at the subject from a fascinating perspective.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.

Taylor (Univ. of Oxford, UK), who has been studying Venus for decades, offers a fascinating compendium containing nearly everything currently known about Earth's nearest planetary neighbor, from ancient times to the present.  Venus is the brightest astronomical object in the sky, other than the sun and moon.  Most everyone has seen it as the "morning" or "evening" star.  It is sometimes referred to as Earths twin because of its similarity to Earths size and mass.  Earths evil twin is more apt, though.  Venus's thick atmosphere, mostly carbon dioxide laced with sulfuric acid, causes runaway greenhouse warming and a surface pressure that rivals the bottom of Earths deepest oceanstruly a hellish place.  Taylor chronicles how scientists came to know this through ground- and space-based studies.  He discusses the planet's formation, internal structure, surface geology, meteorology, etc. and how they dramatically diverged from an origin similar to Earth's.  Also included are detailed descriptions of all major spacecraft sent to Venus, fromMariner andVenera through theVenus Express mission and on to some very speculative future missions.  This is a nonmathematical, yet detailed, reference on Venus.  It will be valuable to anyone interested in exploration of the solar system.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries.