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A review by c8_19
The Sky Atlas: The Greatest Maps, Myths and Discoveries of the Universe by Edward Brooke-Hitching
informative
lighthearted
fast-paced
3.0
I picked this up on a whim when I was browsing at my library, and the selling point for me was the illustrations and pictures, which might sound childish but was exactly what my brain needed. And the star charts were really lovely!
This was a crash course in astronomy through the ages, filled with fun facts and curiosities. The content was rather abbreviated, but I gathered that was kind of the intention. So, this serves well as a good "starting off" text that can point you in other directions regarding which historical figures or theories are key to understanding how the stars have shaped peoples since the beginning of time (or, at least, documented time).
It shied away from a lot of the juicy stuff, though, and by that I mean there's always drama when the minds clash — and we got none of it. Vague mentions of our man Copernicus vs. the Church, and Brahe losing his nose was a very minimal footnote. Or even the Herschel boy making up the "Great Moon Hoax" and leaving Victorians terrified. That felt glossed over. Again, this book was trying to cover a lot of content and did a solid job of doing a summary of a long timeline. I simply felt we could have been given a bit more depth.
This was a crash course in astronomy through the ages, filled with fun facts and curiosities. The content was rather abbreviated, but I gathered that was kind of the intention. So, this serves well as a good "starting off" text that can point you in other directions regarding which historical figures or theories are key to understanding how the stars have shaped peoples since the beginning of time (or, at least, documented time).
It shied away from a lot of the juicy stuff, though, and by that I mean there's always drama when the minds clash — and we got none of it. Vague mentions of our man Copernicus vs. the Church, and Brahe losing his nose was a very minimal footnote. Or even the Herschel boy making up the "Great Moon Hoax" and leaving Victorians terrified. That felt glossed over. Again, this book was trying to cover a lot of content and did a solid job of doing a summary of a long timeline. I simply felt we could have been given a bit more depth.