Amazon.com Review
On Mars the sky is pink, the polar caps are made of dry ice, the volcanoes are 17 miles high, and there is a little rock named Lozenge. Paul Raeburn's new book about Mars is full of fun facts like these. Published by the National Geographic Society, this volume also features 125 striking photographs of the planet's surface, many of them from the 1997
Pathfinder mission. A pair of 3-D glasses are tucked into the cover so that the foldout "Marscape" in the middle of the book practically leaps off the page. Raeburn chronicles the history of humankind's fascination with Mars, presenting the theories of ancient astronomers and the fantasies spun by science fiction writers. When one 19th-century scientist thought he spotted canals on the surface of the planet, many people jumped to the conclusion that there was water on Mars and that there must be life on the planet. This hopeful idea flourished for many decades, until the first pictures from the
Mariner expedition of 1965 revealed that the planet is arid and pocked with craters like Earth's own moon. The
Viking and
Pathfinder missions gathered more data about the planet, photographing its volcanoes and enormous canyons, offering glimmers of hope to the life-on-Mars contingent. Raeburn describes each Mars mission, profiles several of the major players in Mars research, and discusses future exploration of the planet. Raeburn's account of human exploration of the red planet is fascinating, but the pictures are the best thing about this book. Lozenge isn't much to look at, but that 17-mile-high volcano is, and so is the rest of the fourth planet's undulating, dusty terrain.
--Jill Marquis
From Publishers Weekly
Wonder and amazement await all who leaf through this extraordinary new book about the human exploration of Mars. It's not the foreword by Golombek, chief project scientist of the Pathfinder Mission, that will galvanize readers, although he does provide a brief, firsthand (and slightly technical) account of the Pathfinder Mission, which landed successfully on the Red Planet in 1997. Nor is it the exemplary text by Raeburn, a senior editor at Business Week, which does clarify difficult technical and scientific concepts while injecting welcome notes of drama, including a gripping history of our encounters with Mars. Instead, it's the astonishing and unprecedented array of illustrations, mostly photographs, that make this book a keeper. Never before has Mars, the most mysterious and resonant of planets, been brought with such vivid immediacy to human eyes; and in an inspired stroke, the book includes, in addition to stunning 2-D photos, 3-D panoramas of the Martian landscape, viewable through accompanying glasses. For anyone who has ever gazed up at the heavens in awe, this is a book to treasure. 135-plus full-color photos.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
