by Dava Sobel
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Product Description
With her bestsellers Longitude and Galileo’s Daughter, Dava Sobel introduced readers to her rare gift for weaving complex scientific concepts into a compelling narrative. Now Sobel brings her full talents to bear on what is perhaps her most ambitious topic to date—the planets of our solar system. Sobel explores the origins and oddities of the planets through the lens of popular culture, from astrology, mythology, and science fiction to art, music, poetry, biography, and history. Written in her characteristically graceful prose, The Planets is a stunningly original celebration of our solar system and offers a distinctive view of our place in the universe.
* A New York Times extended bestseller
* A Featured Alternate of the Book-of-the-Month Club, History Book Club, Scientific American Book Club, and Natural Science Book Club
* Includes 11 full-color illustrations by artist Lynette R. Cook BACKCOVER: “[The Planets] lets us fall in love with the heavens all over again.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Playful . . . lyrical . . . a guided tour so imaginative that we forget we’re being educated as we’re being entertained.”
—Newsweek
“ [Sobel] has outdone her extraordinary talent for keeping readers enthralled. . . . Longitude and Galileo’s Daughter were exciting enough, but The Planets has a charm of its own . . . . A splendid and enticing book.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“A sublime journey. [Sobel’s] writing . . . is as bright as the sun and its thinking as star-studded as the cosmos.”
—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“An incantatory serenade to the Solar System. Grade A-”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Like Sobel’s [Longitude and Galileo’s Daughter] . . . [The Planets] combines masterful storytelling with clear, engaging explanations of the essential scientific facts.”
—Physics World
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Imaginative and engaging, 2008-08-24
I've read and been delighted by "Longitude" and "Galileo's Daughter" so when I came across "The Planets." I was intrigued and wanted to read it. I knew even before I bought the book that it would be nothing like the other two by Dava Sobel, but by now she has established herself as a great writer and I trusted her and her instincts. If she wanted to take an unorthodox trip across the Solar System, I was all too willing to buy a ticket for the journey. And it was a refreshingly new look at the landscape that I thought I had already known all too well and have become a bit jaded with. Part informative, part imaginative this book both entertains and educates. It is well suited for both young and old readers. Each planet gets its own "voice" and is approached and dealt with from a unique point of view. The two works of art - one in fiction one in music - which this book reminds me of are Italo Calvino's "Cosmicomics" and Gustav Holst's "The Planets." Like Calvino and Holst, Dava Sobel possesses a rare gift of imagination and skill to bring a potentially dry subject and weave it into something that entices us and enthralls us. That's why I decided to recommend this book to my college Astronomy class that I teach this year.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
Good exercice for your mind, 2008-05-05
Did you know that sunlight travels to us at 186 thousand miles per second, or that on Mercury, a day is twice as long as a year? Or that the Aztecs saw Venus as the twin brother of the sun and that a single carat of moon rock sold at auction for more than four hundred thousand dollars? Dava Sobel, author of Longitude and Galileo's Daughter and now The Planets, gives us an awakening insight on the subject.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Okay, not fabuous, 2008-01-12
I find it a little odd that several people have expressed disappointment that the "letter" from Caroline Herschel to Maria Mitchell about the discoveries of Uranus and Neptune in the chapter "Night Airs" was the author's creation. Sobel uses this letter as a means of conveying the info in an interesting manner, much as she communicates from the point of view of the Martian meteorite Allan Hills 84001 a few chapters earlier. Perhaps these same people will be disappointed to learn that the meteorite didn't actually "speak" the words attributed to it in that chapter?
I found this to be a quick read, and I had read the entire book cover to cover in about two hours. It's really written at about a sixth-grade level. It might be a good read, especially if you're unfamiliar with astronomy or need a quick refresher. However, in this reader's opinion, Sobel's other two books "Galileo's Daughter" and "Longitude" are much better.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
 My verdict: essentially mediocre, justified (by) Sobel's unusually nice prose, 2008-01-06
In the hierarchy of sciences, astronomy must be towards the top in popularity, and within that field, the topic of the planets continues to fascinate. Dating back to the era of astronomy's ancestor astrology, the planets have been a subject of interest far longer than black holes, neutron stars, supernovae or big bangs.
Dava Sobel's Planets takes a somewhat classical view of the planets, when they were the ancient wanderers against a fixed-star sky. Thus she includes the moon and sun in her collection (along with Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn), but also discusses more modern-day planets as Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, not to mention the Earth, which was not viewed as a planet until Copernicus removed it from the center of the universe.
Each chapter is an essay about a particular planet (with Uranus and Neptune combined). Sobel doesn't merely describe the given celestial body but instead attaches another theme. For example, her discussion of Earth is given in the context of a history of geography and Mars in the context of the possibility of extraterrestrial life. In her chapter on Pluto, she writes about the controversy of Pluto's planethood; this tiny body would be demoted after the publication of her book.
If you are an astronomy buff, you'll not find much new material here, merely stuff you already know discussed in a slightly different fashion. While decently written, it is not perfect. As an example, due to either poor writing or an actual error, she incorrectly states that Mercury's day is equal to two of its years, though later in the chapter, she gives the correct measurement (roughly 59 Earth-days for a rotation, compared to 88 Earth-days for a revolution).
Overall, this is an okay book, worthy of a high three stars, but not of the same caliber as Galileo's Daughter (the only other Sobel book I've read). If you don't have much knowledge of the planets, this book is a creative (if imperfect) way to learn about them.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
 CDs make a nice companion, 2007-12-05
These five CDs make an informative companion that is easy to follow, without a major investment. At only five hours, you can pick up current thinking about the planets and related bodies (well, this was at least before Pluto got bounced, but the author presciently indicated Pluto was on the ropes), as well as solid, general background information. Except for news from the last ten years or so, I didn't learn much, because the solar system has long been a topic of interest.
I was certainly satisfied with the return on the time investment, and the narrator was easy enough on the ears. My initial concerns about the obvious lack of diagrams and illustrations in a recorded book on the solar system were unfounded. The text evoked enough mental images to get past that, or for this book, they really didn't matter that much. Perhaps I should look at the hardcopy and see what I missed. The essay-based structure also facilitates listening in blocks, as the sections stand relatively freely.
The author seems to find a reasonable balance of technical tone and an approach intended for a more casual, general reader. That goal wasn't always achieved, with the result a bit of a mixed bag from the talking Martian rock to the letter from the woman in the Herschel family to fairly traditional exposition. I could have done without the astrology content and maybe some other asides, such as the friend who ate the moon dust.
3.5 stars, rounded up
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