Skip to main content

The Women of the Moon - Daniel Altschuler and Fernando Ballesteros ****

At the time this book was written, there were 1,586 craters on the Moon that had been named after scientists and philosophers - but only 28 of these were women. The idea, then, was to use this linking theme to provide short biographies of each  of the 28 women, along with a picture of their crater. Like all high concept books, there's a danger that the idea might be stronger than the actual content - after all, by biography number 28, the reader might be feeling a little dazed - but I'm really glad I gave it a try.

After a tweely titled 'Pretext', the book gives us a solid introduction to where the Moon came from, its craters and a brief history of lunar astronomy. This is written with a light touch and works at just the right level of detail. We then get onto our 28 mini-biographies. Inevitably, some of the individuals well-known. So we get names like Marie Curie, Caroline Herschel, Mary Somerville, Annie Cannon, Henrietta Leavitt, Lise Meitner and Emmy Noether - along with the four female astronauts who died in the shuttle disasters. But what's most interesting is the less familiar women.

Certainly for me, names such as Nicole-Reine de la Briere Lepaute, Anne Sheepshanks, Catherine Bruce, Mary Blagg and others were totally unknown. I was particularly fascinated by Blagg who did her astronomical work not at some great observatory, but in Cheadle in Cheshire. The range of figures was impressive - from the classical Hypatia (and rather bizarrely St Catherine, who the authors suggest might be the same person) to the Harvard calculators, from scientific benefactors to Nobel Prize winners. I'll be honest, by the end I was flagging a little and skipped some of the subjects I already knew well, but the rest were excellent.

There were a few small issues. It's disappointing that an Oxford University Press book should be written in US English, use American domestic units of measurement and refer to 'Cambridge, England' to distinguish it from the 'real' Cambridge in Massachusetts. Sometimes I felt that the history didn't provide the kind of explanation of uncertainty I'd expect from good science writing - for instance, we were told as if it were fact that the Library at Alexandra held almost a million volumes, but as far as I'm aware, the catalogue is lost and current best estimates range from 40,000 to 400,000 books. There were also some editing issues. The word 'Earth', referring to the planet, for example, was inconsistently capitalised. More significantly, this was a translation and doesn't seem to have been properly edited in English as, for example, Maskelyne is given the job title 'royal astronomer' rather than 'astronomer royal' and Herschel is said to have moved nearer 'Windsor palace' rather than 'Windsor Castle'.

Apparently in the five years since the book was first written, another three women have had craters named after them. The authors mention a hope to update the book - but I think any more biographies would be in danger of turning Women of the Moon into a reference volume - I'd much rather it stayed as it is, a readable and enjoyable title.
Hardback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Target Earth – Govert Schilling *****

I was biased in favour of this great little book even before I started to read it, simply because it’s so short. I’m sure that a lot of people who buy popular science books just want an overview and taster of a subject that’s brand new to them – and that’s likely to work best if the author keeps it short and to the point. Of course, you may want to dig deeper in areas that really interest you, but that’s what Google is for. That basic principle aside, I’m still in awe at how much substance Govert Schilling has managed to cram into this tiny book. It’s essentially about all the things (natural things, I mean, not UFOs or space junk) that can end up on Earth after coming down from outer space. That ranges from the microscopically small particles of cosmic dust that accumulate in our gutters, all the way up to the ten kilometre wide asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. Between these extremes are two topics that we’ve reviewed entire books about recently: meteorites ( The Meteorite Hunt...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Language of Mathematics - Raúl Rojas ***

One of the biggest developments in the history of maths was moving from describing relationships and functions with words to using symbols. This interesting little book traces the origins of a whole range of symbols from those familiar to all, to the more obscure squiggles used in logic and elsewhere. On the whole Raúl Rojas does a good job of filling in some historical detail, if in what is generally a fairly dry fashion. We get to trace what was often a bumpy path as different symbols were employed (particularly, for example, for division and multiplication, where several still remain in use), but usually, gradually, standards were adopted. This feels better as a reference, to dip into if you want to find out about a specific symbol, rather than an interesting end to end read. Rojas tells us the sections are designed to be read in any order, which means that there is some overlap of text - it feels more like a collection of short essays or blog posts that he couldn't be bothered ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...
Post a Comment
Read more