A fun romp through the possibilities of alien lifeforms and the physics that might allow them to land in our backyards.
Close encounters of the hilarious kind.
Tyson—an astrophysicist and popular science communicator (Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, 2017), director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, and host of StarTalk—thinks that when it comes to aliens, we suffer from a lack of imagination. We share 25% of our genes with bananas—our last common ancestor having lived one and a half billion years ago (“a time in Earth’s tree of life that we could justifiably call ‘the banana split’”)—yet aliens, with whom we share no genes (who may not even have genes) are typically shown as looking far more similar to us than bananas do. Who’s to say they don’t look like octopuses or gaseous clouds? What if they’re the size of fleas? (Could a flea-sized intelligence build and operate an intergalactic spacecraft?) Probably they don’t have the classic ginormous eyes—if they have eyes at all—since big eyes leave less room for big brains, which, presumably, they have if they’ve made it to our corner of the Milky Way. They might not even be made of ordinary matter. If you meet an alien, Tyson suggests tossing a coin or other small object in their direction before shaking tentacles. “If, upon catching it, the Alien spontaneously explodes with the power of two hundred million sticks of dynamite, then it was made of antimatter. Otherwise, you’re good to go.” And that’s not even the most exotic possibility. “The coolest thing ever,” Tyson insists, “would be if Aliens occupied more spatial dimensions than we do.” They’d seem to appear as if from nowhere and would be able to see the inner contents of our bodies, no probes required. Writing in his usual breezy style, the author draws endless examples from science fiction and pop culture, his physics punctuated with all the trademarks his readers have come to expect: an unwavering belief in rationality, a disdain for belief in general, well-timed humor, the obligatory Pluto diss. His imaginings of the strangeness of alien life have the dizzying effect of making us look back at life on Earth through a kind of alien lens, through which our own bodies, customs, and concerns seem strange in their own right, right down to our obsession with aliens, conspiracy theories, and UFOs, all of which say more about us than them—about our yearning for something bigger, our curiosity about the cosmos, our questionable understanding of physics, and our front-facing eyes that so easily, and so wondrously, look up.
A fun romp through the possibilities of alien lifeforms and the physics that might allow them to land in our backyards.Pub Date: May 12, 2026
ISBN: 9781668249970
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Simon Six/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2026
Yes: it's high time for a de-romanticized, de-mythified, close-up retelling of the U.S. Space Program's launching—the inside story of those first seven astronauts.
But no: jazzy, jivey, exclamation-pointed, italicized Tom Wolfe "Mr. Overkill" hasn't really got the fight stuff for the job. Admittedly, he covers all the ground. He begins with the competitive, macho world of test pilots from which the astronauts came (thus being grossly overqualified to just sit in a controlled capsule); he follows the choosing of the Seven, the preparations for space flight, the flights themselves, the feelings of the wives; and he presents the breathless press coverage, the sudden celebrity, the glorification. He even throws in some of the technology. But instead of replacing the heroic standard version with the ring of truth, Wolfe merely offers an alternative myth: a surreal, satiric, often cartoony Wolfe-arama that, especially since there isn't a bit of documentation along the way, has one constantly wondering if anything really happened the way Wolfe tells it. His astronauts (referred to as "the brethren" or "The True Brothers") are obsessed with having the "right stuff" that certain blend of guts and smarts that spells pilot success. The Press is a ravenous fool, always referred to as "the eternal Victorian Gent": when Walter Cronkite's voice breaks while reporting a possible astronaut death, "There was the Press the Genteel Gent, coming up with the appropriate emotion. . . live. . . with no prompting whatsoever!" And, most off-puttingly, Wolfe presumes to enter the minds of one and all: he's with near-drowing Gus Grissom ("Cox. . . That face up there!—it's Cox. . . Cox knew how to get people out of here! . . . Cox! . . ."); he's with Betty Grissom angry about not staying at Holiday Inn ("Now. . . they truly owed her"); and, in a crude hatchet-job, he's with John Glenn furious at Al Shepard's being chosen for the first flight, pontificating to the others about their licentious behavior, or holding onto his self-image during his flight ("Oh, yes! I've been here before! And I am immune! I don't get into corners I can't get out of! . . . The Presbyterian Pilot was not about to foul up. His pipeline to dear Lord could not be clearer"). Certainly there's much here that Wolfe is quite right about, much that people will be interested in hearing: the P-R whitewash of Grissom's foul-up, the Life magazine excesses, the inter-astronaut tensions. And, for those who want to give Wolfe the benefit of the doubt throughout, there are emotional reconstructions that are juicily shrill.
But most readers outside the slick urban Wolfe orbit will find credibility fatally undermined by the self-indulgent digressions, the stylistic excesses, and the broadly satiric, anti-All-American stance; and, though The Right Stuff has enough energy, sass, and dirt to attract an audience, it mostly suggests that until Wolfe can put his subject first and his preening writing-persona second, he probably won't be a convincing chronicler of anything much weightier than radical chic.
Pub Date: Sept. 24, 1979
ISBN: 0312427565
Page Count: 370
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1979
BOOK TO SCREEN
A quirky wonder of a book.
A Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence.
Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. In between this catastrophe and others involving family members’ deaths, he reconstructed his collection. Later, he was appointed as the founding president of Stanford, where he evolved into a Machiavellian figure who trampled on colleagues and sang the praises of eugenics. Miller concludes that Jordan displayed the characteristics of someone who relied on “positive illusions” to rebound from disaster and that his stand on eugenics came from a belief in “a divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that point[ed]…toward better.” Considering recent research that negates biological hierarchies, the author then suggests that Jordan’s beloved taxonomic category—fish—does not exist. Part biography, part science report, and part meditation on how the chaos that caused Miller’s existential misery could also bring self-acceptance and a loving wife, this unique book is an ingenious celebration of diversity and the mysterious order that underlies all existence.
A quirky wonder of a book.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6027-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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