Venus - William Sheehan and Sanjay Shridhar Limaye ***

After reading this impressively illustrated book, you will know a lot about the planet Venus - almost too much. In terms of the volume of content and colour illustrations it's hard to fault, I just felt like I was being given too much information without enough contextual narrative. This is always a balance with popular science: for me this was more like reading a very long Wikipedia entry than an effective book.

Having said that, unless you are already deeply immersed in Venus and its history, there is no doubt that you will learn plenty along the way. William Sheehan and Sanjay Shridhar Limaye start us of with pre-science. We discover how early civilisations regarded Venus (whether as one item or separate morning and evening stars) and the range of myths attached to the planet. The authors then bring in telescopes and, to a degree, the disappointment that gets a better look at Venus did not reveal more, thanks to the planet's permanent, thick cloud cover.

The remainder of the book brings in spectral analyses of the Venusian clouds, what has been discovered using radar and spacecraft, the detailed composition of the clouds, what we know of the surface, how speculation about life on Venus has changed and the different ways that Venus has been observed. And, of course, there are large amounts of material on transits of Venus which, apart from their romantic association with fiction always strike me as deeply boring, considering how much effort went into measuring them. They were important in their day, but still... There's certainly plenty of information and data on a planet that we still know relatively little about.

It's not that there is no narrative. There are a good number of interesting little snippets amongst what a friend calls the 'trainspotting' aspect of science (Rutherford's stamp collecting). For example, we hear how Percival Lowell, fresh from his notorious maps of canals on the surface of Mars, also 'found' linear structures on Venus, only to be mocked by fellow astronomers. But the storytelling is overwhelmed by the detail, describing, for instance, far too frequently the details of the telescopes being used by one individual or another.

This would be a great book if you were reading up on Venus to write an article about it, and will certainly interest dedicated amateur astronomers, but it's a shame it won't appeal to a wider audience.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly digest for free here

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