The Planets
by Dava Sobel
Fourth Estate, $217
Like Diane Ackerman (the pre-Raphaelite bombshell after whom the molecule dianeackerone was named), Dava Sobel serves a rare and luminous consciousness. The author of award-winning best-sellers Longitude and Galileo's Daughter and a former science correspondent for The New York Times, Sobel again sifts science for history, biography and poetry in The Planets. Her large eyes are unclouded. Her galaxies bud and bloom like day-lilies against their backdrop of infinity. 'Even as the planets reveal themselves to scientific investigation,' she writes, 'they retain the emotional weight of their long influence on our lives, and all that they have ever signified in Earth's skies. Gods of old, and demons, too, they were once - they still are - the sources of an inspiring light, the wanderers of night, the far horizon of the landscape of home.'
This home of which she speaks belongs to all of us, but few appreciate it with such rapture. 'My planet fetish began, as best I can recall, in third grade, at age eight - right around the time I learned the Earth had siblings in space, just as I had older brothers in high school and college.' So the book opens and so we understand the deep intimacy of Sobel's relationship with the sky. Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto were always, to her, both 'a paragon of clockwork regularity' and magic. 'The Book of Genesis tells how the dust of the ground, molded and exalted by the breath of life, became the first man. The ubiquitous dust of the early Solar System - flecks of carbon, specks of silicon, molecules of ammonia, crystals of ice - united bit by bit into 'planetesimals', which were the seeds, or first stages, of planets.'
The sky is no less entrancing to Sobel because of its quotidian nature. She pays homage to each planet in chapter form. Myth and hardcore fact are bled of fizz and spin: '[T]he Sun's magnificent corona, normally invisible, flashes into view. Pearl and platinum-coloured streamers of coronal gas surround the vanished Sun like a jagged halo.'