Year of the Comets: A Journey from Sadness to the Stars - Softcover

DeBlieu, Jan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 159376121X ISBN 13: 9781593761219

Publisher: Counterpoint, 2006

Synopsis

On the clearest nights in the darkest places you can see as many as two thousand stars. On what scaffolding are they hung? Jan DeBlieu began to wonder. Her husband had become enveloped in a depression of his own, and both he and DeBlieu were struggling to find points of light out of that darkness. DeBlieu discovers it in the sky above, a firmament of order and beauty that prompts her to consider the worlds inside our minds, the delicate framework of neurons and synapses that support our fragile selves. Year of the Comets is her record of the journey she and her husband take from pain to healing.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

As in her previous book, Wind, DeBlieu uses forces of nature to illuminate the human condition. Here she brackets the harrowing story of her husband's severe depression with the appearances of the comets Hyakutake and Hale-Bopp; in between these astronomical events, she reflects on the chaos and order of the cosmos by weaving a well-paced history of stargazing. But it is the inner universe that dominates: "Demons of the mind: they dwell at the core of this account, alongside the lighted angels that perch in the heavens." And while many amateur astronomers have told their stories, few have had to raise a toddler and deal with a withdrawn and angry husband at the same time, so when DeBlieu goes outside and lies flat on the asphalt to examine the stars, one wonders if she wouldn't rather just stay there for a while. But eventually life begins to improve. "It's the same whether you're searching for personal truths or scientific fact," DeBlieu observes. "Something happens, some sequence of events that elicits a flash of understanding." Seeing significance in the arrival and departure of comets is not unusual, but DeBlieu finds more than portents of doom; instead, grief and longing are tempered by the hope that things might look up again some night. (May)
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Review:

"A poetic compendium of wind phenomenon and a hymn of praise for these towering movements of the air."

"DeBlieu, an award-winning natural-history writer, skillfully folds the scientific information she has had to master--neurological as well as astronomical--into a memoir of toughing out hard times with help from the heavens."

"Books about black holes and galaxies abound. Much rarer are books that show how the cosmos touches our innermost lives. By interweaving her family's struggles with exceptionally lucid ruminations on stargazing and astrophysics, Jan DeBlieu makes plain what many stargazers no doubt feel but dare not say--that looking skyward at night satisfies a deep need to escape the trials of the day."

"DeBlieu's... work brings [her] routinely to the edge of wonder--to space and infinity, in DeBlieu's central metaphor--and therefore to great depths of emotion."

"As in her previous book, Wind, DeBlieu uses forces of nature to illuminate the human condition. Here she brackets the harrowing story of her husband's severe depression with the appearances of the comets Hyakutake and Hale-Bopp; in between these astronomical events, she reflects on the chaos and order of the cosmos by weaving a well-paced history of stargazing."

About this edition

• Publisher: Counterpoint
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 159376121X
• ISBN 13: 9781593761219
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208