Saturn Books

For a man whose name rightfully resides in the rarified company of Columbus, Galileo, Copernicus, Cortes and de Gama, James Hansen's exhaustive biography of Neil Armstrong unspools a painstaking, sometimes wonkish narrative of how this extraordinarily talented, driven and devout man willingly exchanged his deeply cherished anonymity to become the most famous human of the last century.

As an eight-year old watching Armstrong and Aldrin's first steps in 1969, I had every expectation that nearly four decades later I would be writing this review from some long-established and thriving U.S. lunar colony - a vision that was quickly extinguished through the convergence of national space fatique, severe under funding and the somewhat schizophrenic, sclerotic aspirations of NASA over the past quarter century - unfortunate developments that only serve to make Armstrong's unique story and experience all the more compelling.

If you're looking for deep, metaphysical musings on how his lunar celebrity transformed both himself and the world at large - keep browsing. First Man is a walking tour through the guts of the Gemini and Apollo programs prefaced by deep immersion into his Ohio upbringing. Yes, the acronyms and jargon are a little thick but at the end of journey what emerges is a portrait of an intensely private man who remains just that. With just a nod to his place in history, Armstrong provides a much needed reminder of America's potential in microcosm - smart, fallible, unflinching, determined - and oh yeah, he also took a little trip.

A fascinating read.

Simply put, there is no finer book in print that helps us understand the modern-day Christopher Columbus of our times - Neil Armstrong. Not only will you come to better understand the man, the First Man, but you will also walk away with a tremendous appreciation for the Apollo program generally and the Apollo 11 mission specifically. Budget some serious time to get through this book but add it to your list of reads for 2008.

James Hansen's authorized biography of pilot/engineer/astronaut Neil Armstrong is a well written and long awaited in-depth look at a man who has led a truly extraordinary life. His detailed accounts of Armstrong's roots, interests, loves, successes and tragedies made a captive reading experience for me. It was Neil Armstrong and the Apollo 11 journey that inspired my lifelong interest in spaceflight.

I feel for him in his pursuit to maintain as much of a personal life as possible over the years. NASA and the space program may be owned by the taxpayers, but it's human participants are not. Neil has recognized this more than many others have.

An excellent biography. I highly recommend it.

"First Man" is the long awaited authorized biography of Neil Armstrong. The book is a significant work in the body of aerospace history, as Armstrong has consciously lived out of the public eye for most of his life since the Apollo 11 mission. To say the book is detailed is an understatement (did you know that Neil's childhood dog was named "Tippy"?), but James Hansen paints a vivid portrait of the man and his life with exquisite precision. The book is stunning for its depth of information, but is also very readable on a visceral, human level. The net result is a work demonstrating both great academic rigor and the essential character of the first man on the moon.

The book, while keeping Apollo 11 as the center of its arc, does not dwell exclusively on Armstrong's role in the space program. I was pleased to read about his family and personal relationships: understanding these helps the reader to understand who Armstrong is and how he got to be that way. I was found the account of his relationship with his mother, Viola, enlightening, and appreciated the recounting of his role in the Korean war as a very young aviator. Understanding his later successes (and failures) in the greater context of his personal and professional life is one of the true successes of this book. I was, of course, transfixed by the account of the interpersonal relationships between Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins, the three "amiable strangers" of Apollo 11.

Certainly the accounting of Armstrong's test pilot and spaceflight endeavors is of primary interest to anyone likely to read the book, but I was even more impressed than I expected to be by Armstrong's post-Apollo choices. I am especially struck by the parallels between Armstrong and Charles Lindbergh as Armstrong has aged. While still a vital man, Armstrong has willfully chosen to live his life modestly without relying on his fame as the first moonwalker for either ego or income gratification.

This book is by no means a light read, but anyone with an interest in aerospace history should make this book a priority: it is astonishingly well documented, well written, and compellingly told. My earliest childhood memory is watching Armstrong walk on the moon; only now do I really understand and appreciate the "First Man" fully.

Somewhere in my reading, I remember someone who said that there is only one name from the 20th Century that is guaranteed to be remembered 1,000 years from now; the name of the first man to step foot on another planet, Neil Armstrong.

I was alive when Apollo 11 landed and Armstrong made his historic step but, at 11 months old, far from old enough to remember the event. Despite that, though, the events of July 20, 1969 are so much a part of historical memory that it seems like we were all there. There's always been one mystery, though, and that's been the man who actually stepped off the Eagle and onto lunar soil for the first time. Now, the mystery is, at least somewhat, solved thanks to the publication of an fascinating biography of the First Man On The Moon, titled, appropriately enough, First Man.

James Hansen, who was given extraordinary access to Armstrong himself as well as his family and personal records, tells a story that stretches from Armstrong's boyhood in Ohio, to Korea, to his years as a test pilot, all of which were mere training for his ultimate destiny. In addition to a mass (though not overwhelmingly so) of technical data about everything from the X-15 flights that Armstrong flew at Edwards AFB to the Gemini and Apollo programs, Hansen paints, as best he can, a portrait of an intensely private man who was thrust, willingly or otherwise, into an intense spotlight comparable to that of his boyhood hero Charles Lindbergh.

Like Lindbergh, Armstrong was and is, it seems, the reluctant hero. Hansen consistently quotes him as giving equal credit for the achievements of Apollo 11 to his crew mates and the men on the ground and in the factories who built the Apollo program from the ground up.

The most compelling parts of the book, of course, come when Hansen tells the story of the landing and first sojurn onto the lunar surface, including excerpts from recordings of conversations among the crew that were never broadcast publicly. After that, somewhat disappointingly, the book comes to a very quick close. The story rushes through the post-Apollo 11 euphoria and Armstrong's short involvement as a NASA administrator and offers vignettes showing the difficulties that he had coping with the public's fascination with him, some of which was obsessive to say the least.

All in all, though, First Man is an excellent read, and, as the official biographer to the First Man on the Moon, Hansen has done a fabulous job with the task that Armstrong assigned to him.

If you have any interest in the history of the American space program at all, this book is a must-read.

Robert Forward is a scientist who writes fiction. He thinks and describes in terms of science problems and then writes a fictional story around it. The story is of the first manned expedition to Saturn. The science behind the mission is well substantiated and interesting, (but most likely only to geeks like myself.) In Forward's world, Saturn is inhabited with creatures that "swim" in it's dense atmosphere. We are introduced to the intelligent, apex predator life forms that have an interesting first contact with the humans. The characters are interesting, but the writing is a little Tom Clancy-ish. Characters have fairly basic personalties and their interactions are a little stale.

The yarn is a good one and the predicament, of possibly being stranded is very interesting.

. . .for depth of character development! Like many of Forward's novels, there is a definite weakness in that department. HOWEVER, if you like "hard" science fiction -- sci fi which grasps the best that current scientific understanding has to offer, you will thoroughly enjoy this engaging book.

Forward writes of a mission to Saturn's atmosphere in order to build a fuel factory from the (almost) limitless supply of helium contained there. In the process, the crew discovers life -- life supremely suited to its environment.

4.5 for the science, 3 for the plot, 1.5 for the shallow characters. Overall, a 3 -- and a good read.

Spoilers!!

This is typical Forward: wooden characters whose interactions with each other are totally unbelievable, endless detail of beautiful, real near-future science, silly excuse-for-a-plot, and gorgeous, staggering vistas of real otherworlds and their realistic, amazingly creative inhabitants. The ruus, huge gasbags flying in the atmosphere of Saturn, are far more interesting than the humans who contact them, but Forward always does this. The scenes are giant, brilliantly colored, animated Chesley Bonestell movies: the ruus diving to hunt; the humans "climbing down Saturn's Rings" with the aid of the (real) Hoytether, a kind of super rope which Forward marketed; the funeral of an aged rukh whose flockmates sing as she falls endlessly to the lethal gas layers below; the final battle with an alien monster myth-made-real. If you value character and plot, take your business elswhere. For science and the sheer pleasure of the view, read this!

I loved this book. I could hardly put it down. Being a science-oriented person, I had no problem with all the science. It did not seem dry or boring at all. The speculation as to the nature of intelligent life in a non-Terran ecosystem was fascinating. I highly recommend this book.

Can life exist in a gas giant's atmosphere? Intelligent life is
a hard thing to find anywhere in the universe and this book gives us a whale of a story about a sea so far away. A mission of modern science has been to find other intelligent life and communicate with it. Very few unique kinds of intelligent life have been invented by hard science fiction writers. Robert Forward is one of the best at it.

Granted, reading this book might not be considered the greatest accomplishments if you were standing among scholars. However, if your goal is an overview to this subject, then you will have succeeded once you have completed this succinct book. I thought it was well worth the time, but I don't think it has motivated me to go out and buy the complete unabridged version.

Moses Hadas was a noted classical scholar and a talented writer. His version of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon, is the most accessible version available. It retains many of Gibbons insights and offers some of Gibbon's most interesting quotes, as: "...so intimate is the connection between the throne and the alter that the banner of the church is very seldom seen on the side of the people." For anyone interested in the similarities between Rome and the United States it is a must read.

Eventhough this is an abridgement of Gibbon's
great treatise it is a shame that the subject is treated in such a cursory fashion. Little attention is given to one emperor before the reader is pushed on to the next one.

Hadas' edition does give us some of the early history of growth of Christianity, one of the underlying causes of the downfall.

All in all, I found myself wanting more detail. After reading this book I felt like a had read the equivalent of a Chinese meal. It was OK but I soon found myself wanting more

I think the other reviewer misunderstands Hadas's intention. As Hadas states in his introduction, this book is intended as digest and, hopefully, a guide to the fuller work. Hadas pragmatically realizes that most readers are unlikely to undertake a multi-volume book that totals literally thousands of pages; but his abridgement -- rendered with admirable coherence for such an undertaking -- provides both a taste of the fuller work and hopefully a temptation to read it. If more scholars like Hadas existed, the great works of literature and antquity might have a broader readership today.

Moses Hadas has done an excellent job in condensing Gibbon's masterpiece into a portable reader. Though far shorter than the original work that runs into thousands of pages, it succeeds in giving the reader a broad sense of the Decline and Fall, without bogging him down with extraneous details.

After completing this book, I was so intrigued that I bought the full 3-volume Penguin unabridged edition. Up to now, years later, I have only read about three-quarters of the first volume, and I do not expect to complete it anytime soon. It is obviously not that the unabridged version is bad, but that it is meant for a scholarly audience, and thus contains many chapters which are boring for the casual reader, such as a painfully detailed description of the Empire's finances. This abridged version omits all those parts, and leaves the reader with a compelling and coherent narrative of the process of corruption that destroyed arguably the greatest civilisation in the history of Mankind.

I recommend without reservation this book to anyone with an interest in the history of past civilisations.

I found this book sitting on our breakfast table. I flipped through the pages and the chapter on athlete's foot and jock itch caught my attention. I read through it and I later on went to the drugstore and bought what Dr. Buchbinder had recommended. My jock itch went away just as she said.

I almost wish that the cover of this book was more suggestive of a family skin care book. Yes, this is a book that gives a lot of valuable information about the newest beauty trends, what works and doesn't work but my entire family really benefits from this book. I consult this book for my teenager's acne, my infant's eczema , my husband's dandruff problem and my nail fungus. My mother had the shingles and Dr. Buchbinder helped me with that too. I do not want this book out of my house because it is so valuable.

When my son developed a rash, my neighbor lent me Dr. Buchbinder's book. I went through the table of contents and it led me to all the possible causes of my son's rash. I was able to recognize what my son was suffering from as I read this book. Dr. Buchbinder talked to me as if she was right there and then. I ran to the drugstore and picked up what she had recommended and I followed the rest of her instructions. Lo and behold, I cleared Adam's rash. I am reviewing this book to tell the world how valuable this book is!

I would like to compare this book to the Dr. Spock baby book. It tells the reader the most important things one has to know about the skin. If I have a skin problem, all I have to do is turn to the index and it will lead me to the answer. It tells me everything I have to know about the problem and it even gives me all the over-the-counter treatments that I could use to cure the problem. Dr. Buchbinder even goes further and tells me what an expert dermatologist can do for it if the over-the-counter treatments do not work. This book is a must for every family who cares about their skin, hair and nails.

I have recently purchased several books on health and beauty, including this one. This book consists largely of simple, generally well-known information on skin and skin care, plus quasi-philosopical, quasi-poetic "words of wisdom." The information it provides is, at best, superficial and incomplete. Because I rely on the reader ratings to help me choose useful books, I was surprised at my impression of this book, since it had a 5-star rating when I made my purchase. As I look at the reviews now, I notice that all of the previous reviews, which were uniformly lauditory, were posted on the same date in January of 1999, which makes one wonder about the odds of that happening normally.

Susan Sontag is "highbrow." Her essays have scope and intellectual ambition, which readers who have an allergy to these qualities may find "pretentious." She can almost mercilessly point out when something is derivative, weakly conceived, or a sell-out. She has a commitment to cinema as High Art; she takes the contemporary novel to task for being complacent and reactionary; she has a particularly sharp eye for intellectual fraud. Readers who are only interested in marching under one banner or another, or come equipped with biases or blind spots they are proud of, will probably find her annoying.

Sontag may be guilty of "neglecting to take into consideration" entertainment or commercial value, but I'm not sure why it necessarily is a requirement for her to take these things into consideration, since so many others are happily doing so. The fact that a film enjoyed great commercial value does not necessarily exempt it from being an example of "fascist aesthetics"; it simply may mean that it was a fantastically successful example of fascist aesthetics. Sontag was writing at a time when many used the word "fascism" in a very kneejerk way, as though it was this mysterious bad thing, an unknowable plague. Sontag doesn't allow herself such a simplistic attitude. She shows that in fact fascism has many attractive aspects, which is why its aesthetic still turns up everywhere, from Michael Jackson videos to Pink Floyd's The Wall to the WWF. I'm not sure she necessarily thinks this a bad thing; Americans, as we always like to remind the world, are free to enjoy whatever we enjoy, but at least we should not be dishonest about giving things their true names.

The judgement that this writer is a product of "1960s anti-establisment, feminist movement that views anything organized or male-oriented as fascist" is just a inaccurate, vague generalization whose purpose is to dismiss Sontag without having really read or thought about what she is saying. Sontag has skewered "anti-establishment types" and various feminists with the same lack of mercy she dispenses to Arthur Miller and Norman Mailer. Nobody's obligated to read Sontag or like the kind of criticism she practices. But for anyone really interested in cinema, art, theater, the novel, and related subjects, she's essential.

Sontag has once again compiled an intelligent collection of essays on widely varying aesthetic topics. Though she begins with a rather artificial and patronizing obituary for the late man of letters Paul Goodman, whose body of work she is evidently less than enthused with, though she feels obliged to compare him to Sartre. The essay rings of false piety.

She moves into an expansive and favorable essay on Antonin Artaud, the great playwright and artist of the avant-garde movement. Sontag reviews the developments of his great career within the context of moralistic philosophic aesthetics, liking him with Nietzsche, then Sade, then Breton.

Yet the most impressive essay in Under the Sign is titled `Fascinating Fascism,' and it is truly fascinating. In it, Sontag overviews the work of filmmaker, actress, and photographer Leni Riefenstahl, the Nazi propagandist whose body of work includes the esteemed documentaries Triumph of the Will, and Olympia, the latter about the 1936 Olympic games. Sontag reviews Riefenstahl's book of photography on the Nuba tribe in Sudan, which is apparently breathtaking. Sontag concludes that Reifenstahl, despite her `de-Nazification' and renunciation of her political past is still enamored with a fascist ideal, valuing the masculine strength of the male Nuba and placing their bodies in the foreground, while the women remain vulnerable and tucked away in shadowy corners. The essay is highly provocative.

The title essay is about the great philosopher and literary critic Walter Benjamin, whom she reviews favorably. This essay provides some interesting tidbits of information that Hannah Arendt neglects to include in her introduction, such as Benjamin's apparent hatred for Heidegger's philosophy.

Also included in this volume is an excellent and terse review of Roland Barthes, and the fine novelist Elias Canetti, whom she holds in great esteem.

This volume has been reread by me more than once. Sontag explains that her piece on Paul Goodman is being written in a small room in Paris. The author states she was not a friend of Goodman, although several of their worlds coincided with each other. She admired Goodman's work immensely. She describes his voice as cranky, egotistical, American. She finds him comparable, a unique voice, to D.H. Lawrence. Goodman wrote poetry, plays, novels, and social criticism. After the publication of GROWING UP ABSURD in 1960 Goodman was no longer an obscure writer. Sontag complains that he was often taken for granted, even by his admirers. She deems his amateurism identical with his genius.

Susan Sontag asserts that Antonin Artaud failed in his work and his life. His work consisted of a vast collection of fragments. Artaud described intellectual distress. He considered consciousness as process. A leading theme was the link between suffering and writing. All of Artaud's writing was in the first person. He welcomed Surrealism. Artaud's idea of revolution diverged from the Surrealists. He started in poetry. By 1926 in his search for the total art form, Artaud was doing theatrical work. Sontag holds that Artaud offers the greatest quantity of suffering in literature.

The author produces a devastating analysis of the pretensions of Leni Riefenstahl. Sontag's discussion of Alpine movie epics is engaging. Riefenstahl is identified with the Nazi era. Sontag contends that her pbotography book, THE LAST OF THE NUBA, completed thirty years after that era continued to exemplify Nazi ideology.

Walter Benjamin is the subject of the title essay. Benjamin found Saturnine elements in Baudelaire, Proust, Karl Kraus, and even Goethe. To him, subject to melancholy, solitutde appeared to be the fit state of man. Benjamin collected emblem books. His relations with others were complex, veiled. Benjamin felt an affinity to the baroque and the Surreal. He had a microscopic gaze. Benjamin was a wanderer and a collector. By miniaturizing things they became portable. Benjamin wrote that the melancholic permits himself the pleasure of allegory. His characteristic form was the essay.

The piece on Elias Canetti stresses the writer's acquisition of languages. German became the language of his mind. As a child he had spoken Ladino. He had a taste for fanciful blends of knowledge. Canetti was rather close to Freud in technique and interests, but not Freudian. Sontag describes CROWDS AND POWER as an eccentric book.

The essays in this volume are both serious and lively.

There are many reasons to read Susan Sontag. Two of them are her brilliant essays on Walter Benjamin and Elias Canetti that appear in this volume. Both works suggest as much about Sontag and her intellectual and moral values as they do about Benjamin and Canetti. If you care about twentieth-century European intellectual history, don't miss Sontag on Benjamin and Canetti.

When Sontag analyzes the film making style of Leni Riefenstahl, she makes numerous references to the use of the "fascist aesthetics." Sontag's book, Under the Sign of Saturn, drones on about the use of this style of filmmaking employed by both fascist and communist regimes. This genre displays a "preoccupation with situations of control, submissive behavior, extravagant effort, and the endurance of pain; they endorse two seemingly opposite states, egomania and servitude. The relations of domination and enslavement take the form of characteristics pageantry: the massing of people/things around an all-powerful, hypnotic leader figure or force. The fascist dramaturgy centers on the orgiastic transitions between mighty forces and their puppets, uniformly garbed and shown in ever swelling numbers. Its choreography alternates between ceaseless motion and congealed, static, 'virile posing. Fascist art glorifies surrender, it exalts mindlessness, it glamorizes death" (New York: Doubleday, 1980, p. 91). To her credit, Sontag goes on to point out that films such as Disney's Fantasia, Berkeley's The Gangs All Here, and Kubrick's 2001 all fit the fascist art form. At least, she admits that not all films that fit this style are made under dictatorial governments. The tone of her attack on this genre of film would lead one believe, that she was a student of Siegfried Kracauer. Someone blindly lumping all film together as commentary on their society and neglecting to take into consideration their entertainment or commercial value. In fairness to Sontag, one must consider when she made her observations of Riefenstahl. In 1980, the United States was still reeling from the affects of the Viet Nam conflict. Susan Sontag is most probably a product of the 1960's anti-establishment, feminist movement that views anything organized or male oriented as fascist. In the 1999, Sontag's self serving opinions and criticisms seem as antiquated prohibition was as solution to public drunkenness.

Mr. Talbott has researched this book well, but his interpretation is that Saturn was once revolving around the Sun in Earth`s orbit. From the standpoint of planetary physics, this could not have happened. The graphic symbols in question most likely represent the Earth revolving around its crystalline inner core. This is still a book well worth reading for the documentation of historical artifacts.

David Talbott has written a well-researched, interesting, and provocative book. At one time Saturn was much more visible than it is now; it rivaled the sun in its visual splendor and thereby tugged on the human imagination with comparable force. The difficulty with this picture of the past is that Talbott never explains how Saturn subsequently ended up as a small point in the sky lacking all the grandeur it supposedly once possessed. One can only guess at a Velikovsky-type scenario, but this is not plausible from an astronomical point of view. Talbott, with much learning, seems to be writing between the cracks of ancient Near East history and modern physical science, and his thesis lacks scientific backing. I suspect it also fails to persuade Egyptologists and ancient Mesopotamian scholars--those best situated to pass judgement on its historical and mythic content. This is to say that it is highly idiosyncratic. Still, it is much more stimulating and responsible than Velikovsky and von Daniken. Sometimes its fun to turn the kaleidoscope and Talbott lets you do that.

"In the earliest age recalled by the ancients the planet -- or proto-planet -- came forth from the cosmic sea to establish dominion over the entire world. The planet-god ruled as the solitary, central light, worshipped as the god One -- the only god in the beginning.

"Saturn's epoch left a memory of such impact that later generations esteemed the god as the Universal Monarch, the first and ideal king, during whose rule occurred the prehistoric leap from barbarianism to civilization. Throughout Saturn's era of cosmic harmony no seasonal vicissitudes threatened man with hunger or starvation and men suffered neither labor nor war.

"Saturn 'came forth in overwhelming splendour. In the land it became day.' This does not equate Saturn with the 'sun on the horizon.' It means that the coming forth of Saturn inaugurated the archaic day, which began at sunset. So long as the solar orb was visible, the fiery globe of Saturn remained subdued, unable to compete with the sheer light of the former body. But once the solar orb sank beneath the horizon, Saturn and its circle of secondary lights acquired a terrifying radiance." -- excerpt, from the dust jacket

Talbott has laid the cornerstone for a revolutionary and brilliant approach towards explaining mythology and ritual from a historical point of view. His work is clear and convincing, though several details cannot be maintained. Unlike Velikovsky's he works his ideas out in detail and opens the way for multitudes of new ideas. This book might even exceed Velikovsky's work in importance as it does certainly so in scope.

Vicki Lenz has written a thoughtful, but out of date rendition of how Saturn currently conducts business. Because of lower sales numbers, many of the dealerships have reverted to the old way of selling cars. Long gone are the barbeques and the customer information seminars, proactive recalls, and friendly cost effective customer service. Policy now calls for "touching the desk", the typical car sales approach for the sales person to get the manager before the customer leaves the premises as a last ditch effort. Saturn is no longer rated as the number 1 car in sales satisfaction and the JD Powers ranking is sinking annually. Ms. Lenz needs to seriously update her material. The techniques she describes haven't been used by Saturn for quite awhile.

This book gives valuable insight in how to retain customers. It goes way beyond customer satisfaction and brings us back to the simple values that make businesses truly successful.

What a magnificent book! What a great example is the story of Saturn. It proves what we all know, but what so few do - that a genuine love of a product with a genuine care for a customer is the certain way to succeed in business. I'll take 200 copies please for all our real estate offices!

This is a new edition of Harland's fine 'Mission to Saturn', adding
100 new pages of Cassini findings through summer 2006, including of
course the results of the Huygens encounter at Titan. As usual, a
handy, comprehensive volume, nicely written and illustrated. (There is no point in buying Mission to Saturn now, since its contents
are included in CaS:HR)

It may be true that this book contains a lot of information about Saturn and its moons and all the other findings in the outer solar system, however, the writing style is quite complicated for someone that isn't thoroughly experienced in the field of astronomy.

The writing style is extremely technical and overly detailed. For example, there are several sections in the book where the author describes each specific part on the space probe that NASA has built using highly technical terms that only a veteran astronomer or NASA scientist would be familiar with. The average reader will get lost quite fast in all the technical explanations and get quite frustrated. Here is a typical example of the style of writing that the author uses:

"The Ultraviolet Spectrometer (UVS) did not have a lens, it had a series of linear apertures set in line which served as a collimator to produce a field of view 2 by 15 milliradians, then a diffraction grating illuminated a linear array of 128 detectors, each of which measured the brightness on a 1024 point scale to measure the range of 50-170 nanometers in a spectral resolution of 1 nanometre. It was to investigate ultraviolet glows in interplanetary space and in ionospheres, and use limb sounding measurements of the extent to which insolation was absorbed during solar occultations to profile the chemical composition of the upper regions of planetary atmospheres...."

If you can figure out such details then this book is for you. He uses this kind of writing throughout the majority of the book and it gets quite frustrating to try to decipher all the technical jargon.

Furthermore, the author fails to focus on perhaps the most important part of the subject matter, the planets and the moons themselves. He spends so much time going into every little detail of how NASA actually sends its probes to their locations that you get lost trying to figure out what he was trying to explain to begin with. He constantly uses terms only familiar to physics and chemistry majors.

If you are looking for a more amateur-friendly book about astronomy then I recommend checking out David Grinspoon. His writing is a lot less technical and he focuses on the important big picture instead of letting his readers get lost in all the insignificant details that are only important to a scientist, not an amateur astronomy enthusiast.

First off, anyone familiar with the term 'facebook' will find something, if not everything, endearing about this book. Keep in mind that this tackles the topic of a transmutable subject, which has effectively made this book more of an archive of how Facebook was circa 2007 than anything else. But go ahead and reflect on something that literally just happened and indulge in the nostalgic paralysis that is 2008.

Secondly, and this is for the editors, I would have preferred it had all the profile archetypes been lumped together in the middle of the book, like a mini-facebook flanked by commentary only because a) it would have had a greater impact on the reader, particularly if these archetypes had been expanded upon to include lesser known but ubiquitous users (ie. insecure old-money set on proving their effortless lifestyle to onlooking 'friends') b) on several occasions I found some of these supplementary sidebars jarring to the point where I'd read two pages before realizing that I'd skipped an entire section c) a tactile facebook? who doesn't love irony?

Additionally, what the f happened to the original book cover? A few months ago it felt so regal and timeless, like it should have been wearing a smoking jacket and hosting masterpiece theatre. Now it reminds me of something trying to be something that is and has been dated for 20 years, if not the male counterpart to a Molly Jong-Fast novel.

****
Organizational problems and exterior aesthetic aside, this book is to facebook users what a david sedaris is to david sedaris: a self-deprecating inside joke for the very group of people it came to define.
****

I must say, when I heard that three Harvard alumni had conspired to produce a parody of Facebook, I automatically assumed that it wouldn't be that funny, and certainly totally impertinent to the average Facebook user. I was pleasantly surprised, however, to find out that the book is not only hysterical, but I imagine virtually every Facebooker can find something they can relate to in this book.

Philip Latham (1902-1981) was the pseudonym of the astronomer Robert S. Richardson. He wrote a string of science books and articles, mostly for _Analog_ and mostly about astronomy. A couple of articles that I remember with fondness are the controversial "Nice Girls on Mars" (which elicited stern rebuttals from C.S. Lewis and Miriam Allen deFord) and "Space Technology of a Track Meet." Under the Philip Latham byline, he wrote about a score of science fiction short stories that frequently had about as much to do with magic as with astronomy. He wrote only two science fiction novels-- _Five Against Venus_ (1952) and _Missing Men of Saturn_ (1953), both juveniles for Winston.

Latham explains that when he was asked to write a science fiction novel set on Saturn, he found the task to be daunting. (Remember that in the early 1950s, there was very little that we knew about the planet with any certainty.) His solution was to turn to a nineteenth century astronomy book by Richard A. Proctor that confidently asserted that there was almost certainly life on Saturn. He used Proctor's picture of Saturn as the basis for his novel.

Latham then takes the interesting step of populating his novel with less than sterling characters. His hero, Dale Sutton, is that most obnoxious of creatures, the Big Man on Campus at the Space Academy. Sutton gets assigned to a beat-up space tub called the _Albatross_, and the crew begins to take him down a few pegs. But the crew are not wholly virtuous, either. Many of them are uneducated and superstitious-- traits that cause them to balk when they are assigned to investigate the mystery surrounding another crew that has vanished before them on Saturn. And they are traits that will contribute to a tragedy at the end of the novel.

Give this novel a try. It is solidly, if unspectacularly, written. The cover by Alex Schomburg depicts a spaceship tilting precarously on the top of a lava crusted cliff with an erupting volcano in the near background and a smoky, acerbic atmosphere. We now know that Saturn is predominantly a gas giant. But given the state of knowledge at this time, we can hardly fault Latham or Schomburg on scientific grounds.

This is a "space opera" of the first order. I first read it as a very young man, shortly after it was published, and the work has stuck with me over all these years. I recently found a copy in a used book store (no, I won't sell it) and gave it a reread. The little boy in me enjoyed it as much now as when I first discovered it. Recommend this one highly and those interested in the history of this particular genre certainly should give it a close look.