BOOKSHELF

Natural History, Feb, 2000

Cardano's Cosmos: The Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer, by Anthony Grafton (Harvard University Press, 2000; $35; 284 pp.; illus.)

In this eloquent study of a sixteenth-century astrologer who combined mathematics, astronomy, and medicine in counseling people at every level of society, Princeton University historian Grafton offers readers both a "microscopic investigation of an individual's mind and a wide-angled survey of the millennial intellectual traditions which nourished it."

Captured by Miens: The Search for Life and Truth in a Very Large Universe, by Joel Achenbach (Simon and Schuster, 1999; $25; 415pp.; illus.)

In his lively saga of the search for hard evidence of extraterrestrial life, Washington Post staff writer Achenbach has interviewed such disparate characters as the late Carl Sagan, NASA chief Dan Goldin, and lounge singer Henry Harris. Reporting on both way-out theories and scientific discoveries, the author remains funny, fair-minded, and firmly planted on Earth.

Here Be Dragons: The Scientific Quest for Extraterrestrial Life, by David W. Koerner and Simon LeVay (Oxford University Press, 2000; $27.50; 256 pp.)

The authors--a planetary scientist and a neuroanatomist--describe the exciting, provocative work of such scientists as NASA Ames Research Center's Chris McKay, who is investigating cold, dry environments that might offer clues to life in the cosmos, and Carnegie Mellon University's Hans Moravec, a "roboticist, futurologist, and general out-of-the-box thinker." Whoever predicted the end of science was dead wrong.

Journey Beyond Selene Remarkable Expeditions Past Our Moon and to the Ends of the Solar System, by Jeffrey Kluger (Simon and Schuster, 1999; $26; 315 pp.)

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the leading U.S. center for the unmanned exploration of space, is the setting for tales of scientists' adventures with technology. Time magazine writer Kluger, in the course of chronicling JPL's milestones, became convinced that sooner or later we were going to find life out there.

The Runaway Universe: The Race to Find the Future of the Cosmos, by Donald Goldsmith (Perseus/Helix, 2000; $25; 256 pp.; illus.)

Amid the avalanche of late-twentieth-century discoveries in astronomy and astrophysics, Goldsmith traces the key steps that led to the vindication of Einstein's nonzero "cosmological constant" and the further recognition that the universe appears to be expanding at an accelerating pace.

The Search for Life on Mars, by Malcolm Walter (Perseus/Helix, 1999; $25; 170 pp.; illus.)

The more we investigate Earth's earliest life forms, the more we recognize the similarities between our planet and Mars. Walter, an Australian paleobiologist, astrobiologist, and longtime NASA adviser, surveys the strategies and possible results of future explorations of the red planet.

The Sky Is Not the Limit: Adventures of an Urban Astrophysicist, by Neil de Grasse Tyson (Doubleday, 2000; $23.95; 194 pp.)

A visit to New York's Hayden Planetarium gave an African American youngster from the Bronx the idea of being an astrophysicist when he grew up. So he became one--and, at thirty-eight, the youngest-ever director of that same planetarium.

The books mentioned in "Natural Selections" are usually available from the Museum Shop of the American Museum of Natural History, (212) 769-5150.