The science gift book of the year, a stunning blend of words and images that shows once again why Timothy Ferris has been called today's greatest science writer. Twenty years ago, Timothy Ferris enjoyed his first enormous success with his now-classic picture book, Galaxies. Since then, he has published other bestsellers, produced award-wining films and won numerous honours. But not until Life Beyond Earth has he created a book that can rival Galaxies in visual splendour. Celebrating the search for life on other worlds, this sumptuously designed work, printed to art book standards, is a treat for the eye and for the mind. Drawn from an original documentary produced for KCTS/PBS, it strikingly juxtaposes Hubble Space Telescope photographs with cover art from pulp science fiction books, and hand-drawn maps of Mars's canals by astronomer Percival Lowell with the crystal-clear images of the Viking lander. There are more than 200 illustrations in all - given rich, thought-provoking context by Ferris's brilliant text, and by observations from such scientists as Freeman Dyson, Richard Gott and Stephen Jay Gould.
Timothy Ferris is the author of twelve books - among them The Science of Liberty and the bestsellers The Whole Shebang and Coming of Age in the Milky Way, which have been translated into fifteen languages and were named by The New York Times as two of the leading books published in the twentieth century, and Seeing in the Dark, named one of the ten best nonfiction books of 2002. He also edited the anthologies Best American Science Writing 2001 and the World Treasury of Physics, Astronomy, and Mathematics. A former editor of Rolling Stone magazine, he has published over 200 articles and essays in The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, Forbes, Harper's, Scientific American, Vanity Fair, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, and other periodicals.
Ferris wrote and narrated three television specials - "The Creation of the Universe," which aired repeatedly in network prime time for nearly 20 years, "Life Beyond Earth" (1999), and "Seeing in the Dark" (2007). He produced the Voyager phonograph record, an artifact of human civilization containing music and sounds of Earth launched aboard the twin Voyager interstellar spacecraft, which are now exiting the outer reaches of the solar system. He was among the journalists selected as candidates to fly aboard the Space Shuttle in 1986, and has served on various NASA commissions studying the long-term goals of space exploration and the potential hazards posed by near-Earth asteroids.
Called "the best popular science writer in the English language" by The Christian Science Monitor and "the best science writer of his generation" by The Washington Post, Ferris has received the American Institute of Physics prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His works have been nominated for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.
A Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Professor Ferris has taught in five disciplines - astronomy, English, history, journalism, and philosophy - at four universities, and is now emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
