The increase in our knowledge of the solar system during the five years since the author last revised this book (1963) greatly exceeds that in the previous two decades. The program of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the space program of the U.S.S.R. have been prime contributors to this rapid progress, but the impetus has carried over to groundbased studies of the Moon and planets as well. The advances in radio and radar astronomy alone are striking, and are continuing at an accelerating pace.
This third edition of Mr. Whipple's popular and authoritative book is thoroughly revised in light of this new knowledge. The most extensive revisions are in the chapters on the Moon, Mars, and Venus--the members of the solar system on which the various space programs have concentrated. The author has included many new and dramatic illustrations in this third edition, among them photographs taken from U.S. and Russian space craft. There are striking photographs of the Moon, with close-up views of its surface texture, pictures of Mars taken from Mariner IV, and radar pictures of Venus that "see through" that planet's obscuring cloud layer.
The book is written in nontechnical language and with a lucid, witty style that is readily understandable to the interested layman. Mathematics has been avoided, and scientific methods and processes are described in simple terms. In presenting the latest information about the planets and their moons, Mr. Whipple discusses their origin and evolution, motions, atmospheres, temperatures, surface conditions, the environment essential for life as we know it, and the possibilities of life outside the Earth. He concludes with a discussion of current theories about the origin of the solar system.
Two of the world’s leading scholars of the Aztec language and culture have translated Sahagún’s monumental and encyclopedic study of native life in Mexico at the time of the Spanish Conquest. This immense undertaking is the first complete translation into any language of Sahagún’s Nahuatl text, and represents one of the most distinguished contributions in the fields of anthropology, ethnography, and linguistics.
Written between 1540 and 1585, the Florentine Codex (so named because the manuscript has been part of the Laurentian Library’s collections since at least 1791) is the most authoritative statement we have of the Aztecs’ lifeways and traditions—a rich and intimate yet panoramic view of a doomed people.
The Florentine Codex is divided by subject area into twelve books and includes over 2,000 illustrations drawn by Nahua artists in the sixteenth century.
Book Seven tells the origin stories of the sun, the moon, and the stars—which gods created them, what powers they each embody, and how they are related to Aztec astrology. This book also discusses the meaning and cause behind hail, lightning, rainbows, wind, and different types of weather.
"Science claims it will one day be able to eliminate fathers from the equation by mating bone marrow with ovum. When that day comes, I imagine this book, along with a handful of other works (King Lear, Fun Home) will become even more necessary. Herein find the blueprints for the mystery, the maps for the uncharted, the keys to the archetype."
—Nick Flynn, author of The Reenactments and Another Bullshit Night in Suck City
"At this moment, I find myself at loose ends, lost in the various vacuums left by my father's dying and my sons' departures out into the voids. Yet this stunning constellation of essays centered me, became for me fine instruments of reckoning of where to stand in the ceaseless entropic dynamic of kin, of paternal keening. These waxing meditations demonstrate the inflationary universe, the heft and velocity of that big ol' nothing. They elegantly fill, with sober hope and the balm of joy, the terrifying, infinite spaces between those waning stars."
—Michael Martone, author of Michael Martone and Four for a Quarter
"What an unreachable mystery the father is, preoccupied, unknowable, pervasive. In these fascinating essays, a shared portrait emerges as writers articulate the perpetual puzzle of the father and, with grace and candor, explore what it means to not know him, to never know him. As one voice, these essays investigate the man—his inventories, his myths, his mere traces—who makes up our horizons, who forever shimmers there beyond our collective grasp."
—Susanna Sonnenberg, author of Her Last Death and She Matters: A Life in Friendships
Selected from the country's leading literary journals and publications—Crazyhorse, Colorado Review, The Nervous Breakdown, Creative Nonfiction, Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, The Missouri Review, The Normal School, and others—Man in the Moon brings together essays in which sons, daughters, and fathers explore the elusive nature of this intimate relationship and find unique ways to frame and understand it: through astronomy, arachnology, storytelling, map-reading, television, puzzles, DNA, and so on. In the collection's title essay, Bill Capossere considers the inextricable link between his love of astronomy and memories of his father: "The man in the moon is no stranger to me,” he writes. "I have seen his face before, and it is my father's, and his father's, and my own.” Other essays include Dinty Moore's "Son of Mr. Green Jeans: A Meditation on Missing Fathers,” in which Moore lays out an alphabetic investigation of fathers from popular culture—Ward Cleaver, Jim Anderson, Ozzie Nelson—while ruminating on his own absent father and hesitation to become a father himself. In "Plot Variations,” Robin Black attempts to understand, through the lens of teaching fiction to creative writing students, her inability to attend her father's funeral. Deborah Thompson tries to reconcile her pride in her father's pioneering research in plastics and her concerns about their toxic environmental consequences in "When the Future Was Plastic.” At turns painfully familiar, comic, and heartbreaking, the essays in this collection also deliver moments of seari
Set in the High Atlas in pre-modern Morocco, Moon and Henna Tree chronicles the rise and fall of a local potentate, Hmmu. Not content with the territory left to him upon his father’s death, Hmmu, under the influence of his scheming advisor, Ibn al-Zara, begins a campaign to acquire those lands that adjoin his, either through marriage or physical force.
Ahmed Toufiq’s subtle investigation of the abuse of power and its effects on those who suffer under its tyranny also provides a unique look at Amazigh (Berber) culture. While most of Toufiq’s contemporaries focus on modern urban Morocco, he provides a fascinating, and accurate, account of the customs and traditions of a large, yet often ignored, segment of the population. Moon and Henna Tree (in the original Arabic) won the Moroccan Book Prize in 1989.
A dispatch from a foreign land, when crafted by an attentive and skilled writer, can be magical, transmitting pleasure, drama, and seductive strangeness.
In The Moon, Come to Earth, Philip Graham offers an expanded edition of a popular series of dispatches originally published on McSweeney’s, an exuberant yet introspective account of a year’s sojourn in Lisbon with his wife and daughter. Casting his attentive gaze on scenes as broad as a citywide arts festival and as small as a single paving stone in a cobbled walk, Graham renders Lisbon from a perspective that varies between wide-eyed and knowing; though he’s unquestionably not a tourist, at the same time he knows he will never be a local. So his lyrical accounts reveal his struggles with (and love of) the Portuguese language, an awkward meeting with Nobel laureate José Saramago, being trapped in a budding soccer riot, and his daughter’s challenging transition to adolescence while attending a Portuguese school—but he also waxes loving about Portugal’s saudade-drenched music, its inventive cuisine, and its vibrant literary culture. And through his humorous, self-deprecating, and wistful explorations, we come to know Graham himself, and his wife and daughter, so that when an unexpected crisis hits his family, we can’t help but ache alongside them.
A thoughtful, finely wrought celebration of the moment-to-moment excitement of diving deep into another culture and confronting one’s secret selves, The Moon, Come to Earth is literary travel writing of a rare intimacy and immediacy.
As a child of deaf adults (CODA), Pia Taavila first learned to communicate when her deaf father fingerspelled the names of toys in her crib and her mother showed her the signs for objects in picture books. From this primary visual orientation, in combination with her own innate sense of imagery, Taavila crafted the lush verse featured in Moon on the Meadow: Collected Poems.
Taavila uses the graphic power of her poetry to evoke emotions about all aspects of existence — love, loss of love, family, death, and desire — feelings elicited through a lens attuned to the simple beauty of the natural. Most of the poems in Moon on the Meadow have been published at least once in established journals, testimony to the broad appeal of her passionate outlook on life. Yet, Taavila believes that her experiences as a CODA are essential to her ability to write at all. She never strays far from her home, her family, and the comforts they bring her through her art:
At a wedding, a flautist’s
languid notes lilt on the air.
My mother, who cannot hear,
leans forward, attentive
to the dip and sway of his body.
She signs to me:
It sounds like butterflies
A freelance writer and journalist, Vicenta (“Vicky”) Lumière has moved beyond her upbringing in the diverse Irish Channel neighborhood of New Orleans. But a visit to her childhood friend Lonnie Cavanaugh in the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women brings back a flood of memories.In Navel of the Moon, the follow-up to her acclaimed debut The Fifth Sun, Mary Helen Lagasse turns to the 1950s and 60s, where a young Vicky learns that the complicated people that we become as adults and the complicated world that adults create are shaped by events in childhood. The adults around her, beginning with her Mexican grandmother, Mimy, the family storyteller—who says she is from the “navel of the moon”—often confound and sometimes trouble Vicky. Yet Vicky’s strength of character is profoundly affected by the complexity of life, and in particular that of her troubled childhood friend Lonnie and of Valentina Dreyfus, the Holocaust survivor who becomes Vicky's closest confidante.
Never Seen the Moon carefully yet lucidly recreates a young woman's wild ride through the American legal system. In 1935, free-spirited young teacher Edith Maxwell and her mother were indicted for murdering Edith's conservative and domineering father, Trigg, late one July night in their Wise County, Virginia, home. Edith claimed her father had tried to whip her for staying out late. She said that she had defended herself by striking back with a high-heeled shoe, thus earning herself the sobriquet "slipper slayer."
Immediately granted celebrity status by the powerful Hearst press, Maxwell was also championed as a martyr by advocates of women's causes. National news magazines and even detective magazines picked up her story, Warner Brothers created a screen version, and Eleanor Roosevelt helped secure her early release from prison. Sharon Hatfield's brilliant telling of this true-crime story transforms a dusty piece of history into a vibrant thriller. Throughout the narrative, she discusses yellow journalism, the inequities of the jury system, class and gender tensions in a developing region, and a woman's right to defend herself from family violence.
“Nobody who has not taken one can imagine the beauty of a walk through Rome by full moon,” wrote Goethe in 1787. Sadly, the imagination is all we have today: in Rome, as in every other modern city, moonlight has been banished, replaced by the twenty-four-hour glow of streetlights in a world that never sleeps. Moonlight, for most of us, is no more.
So James Attlee set out to find it. Nocturne is the record of that journey, a traveler’s tale that takes readers on a dazzling nighttime trek that ranges across continents, from prehistory to the present, and through both the physical world and the realms of art and literature. Attlee attends a Buddhist full-moon ceremony in Japan, meets a moon jellyfish on a beach in Northern France, takes a moonlit hike in the Arizona desert, and experiences a lunar eclipse on New Year’s Eve atop the snowbound Welsh hills. Each locale is illuminated not just by the moonlight he seeks, but by the culture and history that define it. We learn about Mussolini’s pathological fear of moonlight; trace the connections between Caspar David Friedrich, Rudolf Hess, and the Apollo space mission; and meet the inventors of the Moonlight Collector in the American desert, who aim to cure all kinds of ailments with concentrated lunar rays. Svevo and Blake, Whistler and Hokusai, Li Po and Marinetti are all enlisted, as foils, friends, or fellow travelers, on Attlee’s journey.
Pulled by the moon like the tide, Attlee is firmly in a tradition of wandering pilgrims that stretches from Basho to Sebald; like them, he presents our familiar world anew.
--Spokes and braids in the rings of Saturn
--Eddying currents around Jupiter's Great Red Spot
--Volcanic eruptions on the satellite Io
These are the images from Voyager that have made headlines and captured the public imagination. Now, a giant of twentieth century astronomy guides us on a literary voyage of discovery that retraces the steps of this and other recent space probes--Viking, Mariner, Pioneer, as well as Russian efforts--that have revolutionized our understanding of Earth's nearest neighbors. Every step of the way, Fred Whipple provides the basic foundation in astronomy that enables the reader to be not merely awed and entranced but thoroughly informed, with a solid and satisfying understanding of the workings of our solar system.
In a dazzling combination of text and illustrations, Orbiting the Sun offers vistas that rival science fiction:
--mountains on Mars twice the height of Everest
--thunderstorms and sulfuric acid clouds on Venus
--the possibility of liquid nitrogen oceans on Titan
But the author also explores in precise detail the tests carried out by the Viking Lander that with virtual certainty have ruled out the hope of finding life on Mars.
This completely revised and updated edition of Whipple's classic Earth, Moon, and Planets once again presents Earth within its planetary context. This view allows us to speculate on such provocative concepts as the connection between an asteroid collision and the extinction of the dinosaurs. But the most obvious enhancement of this new edition is the stunning photographs, that include the eerie panorama of the Martian landscape taken from the Viking Landers, the dramatic sweep of Saturn's thousand rings, and full color port raits of the Jovian moons--the battered face of Callisto, Europa with its web of thin scratches, the "superhighways" of Ganymede, and Io with its volcanic plumes.
Fred Whipple has introduced two generations of student and amateur astronomers to the wonders of the solar system. In Orbiting the Sun he will charm and inform an entirely new audience.
Gathering for the first time all of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s writings on Japanese civilization, The Other Face of the Moon forms a sustained meditation into the French anthropologist’s dictum that to understand one’s own culture, one must regard it from the point of view of another.
Exposure to Japanese art was influential in Lévi-Strauss’s early intellectual growth, and between 1977 and 1988 he visited the country five times. The essays, lectures, and interviews of this volume, written between 1979 and 2001, are the product of these journeys. They investigate an astonishing range of subjects—among them Japan’s founding myths, Noh and Kabuki theater, the distinctiveness of the Japanese musical scale, the artisanship of Jomon pottery, and the relationship between Japanese graphic arts and cuisine. For Lévi-Strauss, Japan occupied a unique place among world cultures. Molded in the ancient past by Chinese influences, it had more recently incorporated much from Europe and the United States. But the substance of these borrowings was so carefully assimilated that Japanese culture never lost its specificity. As though viewed from the hidden side of the moon, Asia, Europe, and America all find, in Japan, images of themselves profoundly transformed.
As in Lévi-Strauss’s classic ethnography Tristes Tropiques, this new English translation presents the voice of one of France’s most public intellectuals at its most personal.
Eighteen essays provide an accessible, entertaining look into a system of millennia-old legends and beliefs.
Mythology is one of the great creations of humankind. It forms the core of sacred books and reflects the deepest preoccupations of human beings, their most intimate secrets, their glories, and their infamies.
In 1990, Alfredo López Austin, one of the foremost scholars of ancient Mesoamerican thought, began a series of essays about mythology in the Mesoamerican tradition, published in México Indígena. Although his articles were written for general readers, they were also intended to engage specialists. They span a divers subject matter: myths and names, eclipses, stars, left and right, Méxican origins, Aztec incantations, animals, and the incorporation of Christian elements into the living mythologies of Mexico. The title essay relates the Mesoamerican myth explaining why there is a rabbit o the moon’s face to a Buddhist image and suggests the importance of the profound mythical concepts presented by each image.
The eighteen essays in this volume are unified by their basis in Mesoamerican tradition and provide an accessible, entertaining look into a system of millennia-old legends and beliefs.
Coyle and Filreis present the entire extant correspondence between the two men. The fifty-one Rodriguez Feo letters and ten of the numerous Stevens letters are printed here for the first time, and the exchange between the two is unusually complete. The work includes a critical introduction and complete annotation of the letters.
PEN Oakland National Literary Award, 2008
Colleen J. McElroy's poetry shoots for the moon, and takes it in, too, in one way after another. The collection’s award-winning poems animate women’s experiences of sex, shopping, and dancing, while offering telling insight into the struggles and silver lining of lust, love, illness, and aging. Rich with vivid imagery and candid storytelling, Sleeping with the Moon takes readers on moonlit adventures under the night sky, through the barroom’s smoky haze, and under the covers....Beware: such delicate
sights have driven more than one woman to despair
instead she watched him breathe-- relishing
for a moment that secret space where night
grows soft and the moon’s detumescence forgives--
and where if this jeweled light holds they might
strip themselves of years if only for one night
--from “In Praise of Older Women”
A Telegraph Best Science Book of the Year
“A witty yet in-depth exploration of the prospects for human habitation beyond Earth…Spacefarers is accessible, authoritative, and in the end, inspiring.”
—Richard Panek, author of The Trouble with Gravity
It’s been over fifty years since Apollo 11 landed on the moon. So why is there so little human presence in space? Will we ever reach Mars? And what will it take to become a multiplanet species? While many books have speculated on the possibility of living beyond the Earth, few have delved into the practical challenges.
A wry and compelling take on the who, how, and why of near-future colonies in space, Spacefarers introduces us to the engineers, scientists, planners, dreamers, and entrepreneurs who are striving right now to make life in space a reality. While private companies such as SpaceX are taking the lead and earning profits from human space activity, Christopher Wanjek is convinced this is only the beginning. From bone-whittling microgravity to eye-popping profits, the risks and rewards of space settlement have never been so close at hand. He predicts we will have hotels in low-earth orbit, mining and tourism on the Moon, and science bases on Mars—possibly followed (gravity permitting) by full blown settlements.
“Nerdily engaging (and often funny)…Technology and science fiction enthusiasts will find much here to delight them, as Wanjek goes into rich detail on rocketry and propulsion methods, including skyhooks and railguns to fling things into orbit…He is a sensible skeptic, yet also convinced that, in the long run, our destiny is among the stars.”
—The Guardian
“If the events of this year have had you daydreaming about abandoning the planet entirely, [Spacefarers] is a geekily pleasurable survey of the practicalities and challenges.”
—The Telegraph
“The best book I’ve read on space exploration since Isaac Asimov.”
—Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic
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