The Fallen Sky – An Intimate History of Shooting Stars by Christopher Cokinos; Tarcher/Penguin, New York, New York (soft cover) $16.95; August 2010.
If you found yourself craning your neck toward the heavens of late looking for shooting stars – here’s a terrific book to read when you have finished your stint of sky watching.
Author Christopher Cokinos has pulled together a fabulous book on rocks from space, those collectibles from the cosmos. He tells the tale of the “love affair” between meteorites and individuals on the hunt for these specimens from space.
“Meteorites are, in fact, implicated in the seeding of life’s ingredients on Earth,” Cokinos writes. “And even the most indifferent know that these bits of former asteroids have rained devastation in the past and threaten to do so in the future.”
But what is so engaging about this book are the personal looks at explorers, professors, scientists and other characters that are passionate – and even fanatical – about meteorites. In this volume you’ll find yourself intrigued about private collectors of meteorites, as well as those who deal in hocking space stones.
Again, the author has woven together the science of meteorites and those on the chase for them – be it Daniel Barringer who popularized the idea that craters could be produced by meteorites to Harvey Nininger, noted collector and adventurer who opened the first meteorite museum.
The Fallen Sky is full of colorful characters, and generous helpings of mythology to scientific studies of the day. In writing the book, Cokinos takes the reader along on his travels from Kansas to Greenland and from Australia to the South Pole.
Once you’ve finished this book, your next shooting star observation will take on a new world of its own.
For more information on this book, go to:
http://us.penguingroup.com/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9781585427208,00.html
By Leonard David