Former New York Times science reporter Dava Sobel has covered much ground very quickly in establishing herself as an author. At least two of her books, Longitude and Galileo's Daughter, are bestsellers, and now she is taking on our Solar System.
But her take on The Planets is no mere index of satellites and orbits. Here is the Solar System refracted through a range of human experiences, general or particular.
Ten of the dozen chapters deal with the major bodies (our Moon gets its own but Uranus and Neptune are dealt with together), and each receives highly individual treatment.
So commanding is the physics of the Sun, that there is little place in its description for much but hard science (and the odd reference to the Book of Genesis), but in Mercury the author invokes the full panoply of Olympian gods and their mythological servants before retreating to more solid ground via Copernicus and Tycho Brahe.
Venus receives the romantic treatment. "Hours into the night," we are told, "Venus still outshines every other light, unless the Moon intrudes to best her … though Venus is the larger and the fairer by far". Blake, Wordsworth and C.S. Lewis are used to flesh out the picture of "Beauty".
As we progress through the book, we grow ever cooler and darker as our distance from the Sun increases.
Earth is a voyage of discovery: Columbus, Cook and Darwin are invoked to explain forest, mountain and ocean. Mars is a first-person narrative that marches gradually through cosmology and geology to a recap of the high-tech speculation about our nearest neighbour's role in the future of Homo sapiens.
Broken into its components, there seems little here that is new. But its presentation and delivery (Sobel is no mean writer) lifts The Planets out of the general run of books about the Solar System - as it must, lacking any illustration other than unexceptional black-and-white reproductions of artworks, maps and sketches.
If you fancy a tour of our celestial neighbours in company with an apparently well-read and articulate guide, this book could be for you.
