The Lives of the Planets: A Natural History of the Solar System [Hardcover]

I must say I was very disappointed in this book. Not that it's bad, it's just not at all what I expected. "Lives of the hardware launched into space" would be a more accurate, although perhaps less alluring, title.
I would say that roughly 1/3 of this book is actually about the planets and other celestial bodies. Most of it is about hardware, NASA, science administration and funding, mission managers and engineers, and the authors family life and childhood interests. Things like planetary surface topography and chemistry, geological history, atmospheres, orbital mechanics, etc. - the actual "Lives of the Planets" - are skipped over with an absolute minimum of detail. Volcanism on Io is barely dignified with a mention while the political infighting between different space agencies and laboratories takes center stage. To my taste, there just not enough meat in this book. If you enjoy "human interest" stories, by all means go ahead and buy this book - just don't expect much science. You'd be better off browsing through old Scientific Americans.
By the way - if someone can recommend a good, up-to-date "science" book on the Solar system, I'd appreciate it.

As already noted, this is a history of the various satellite missions to the planets instead of the planets themselves. And that's OK; I expected such, having read the reviews and a few sample passages in the store. What shocked me, though, was Corfield's odd and plainly mean-spirited decision to focus on the programs' blunders and failures, however miniscule they may be in comparison to their accomplishments. Strange to see an astronomer, someone who presumably has a big-picture outlook on the world, caught up in such pettiness.

Corfield consistently portrays of scientists as a stupid lot, their beliefs founded on fads and personal prejudice until the evidence knocks them upside their empty heads. Funny thing about that evidence; it seems to show up of its own accord, with no human responsibility for its discovery. (Who's pursuing the truth and amending previous theories, then? Flying spaghetti monsters?) Any researcher who has ever come to a conclusion we now perceive as erroneous, regardless of the limitations of their era or tools, is smirkingly dismissed as worthless and chuckleheaded. (Galileo failed to properly identify Saturn's rings with his 17th-century telescope - heh, what a hopeless moron.) Forgive me for flinging this accusation at an accomplished astronomer, but - Corfield doesn't seem to get how science works. I imagine that "PWNED!!!!!" is a prominent part of his everyday vocabulary.

Corfield's approach makes his account of space exploration opaque. It's not important what the Pioneer missions observed, only that those losers eventually got thrashed by Voyager; it's not important what Voyager observed, only that its team was unforgivably boneheaded for not following the course Corfield would have. Corfield's...interesting priorities don't address the questions one usually has about these programs. His technical explanations also fail to define crucial terminology (H-R diagrams, for example, are mentioned but never explained), leaving laymen in the dark.

The author also makes the poor decision to shove a ten-page climate change denial manifesto into the very first chapter, blaming the phenomenon completely on sunspot activity. (A thin layer of "some people say" weasel words fools no one; take responsibility for you own crackpot theory, buddy.) He introduces the idea of climate change as a collection of "doom-laden forecasts [from] highly-paid think-tank moguls and academics with an eye on their funding". Ah, yes, Big Science, with all those researchers getting rich off global warming! My heart and expectations sank as I read it; it nearly discredited Corfield for me right off the bat.

There are some neat things in here, like a thorough and convincing archaeological exploration of Stonehenge as a giant astronomical clock in the Sun chapter. Corfield also worked on Britain's Beagle 2 mission to Mars, which never reached its landing site; we get a vivid and insightful chronicle from Corfield on the would-be landing day, as it gradually becomes sadly apparent that things have gone awry. Every time I got hooked by something awesome and intriguing, though, Corfield soon steered back to his personal grudges and schoolyard smirks. You can pick out good tidbits from "Lives of the Planets", and it might be worth borrowing from the library if you're interested in astronomy. If you want a solid popular-science book about the solar system, though, I'd recommend Dava Sobel's "The Planets" instead.

I needed a book for a book report I was doing. I am also not an astrophysicist, so I was extremely happy that this was such an easy book to read and understand. It gave a fairly comprehensive overview of where we have come with exploration since the beginning of the space age. I enjoyed it.

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