Voyage to Mars: NASA's Search for Life Beyond Earth - Hardcover

Laurence Bergreen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 157322166X ISBN 13: 9781573221665

Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover, 2000

Synopsis

The author probes the special appeal of the Red Planet among scientists, exploring the Mars obsession and its implications for science, philosophy, and the future of humankind. 40,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

Laurence Bergreen is the author of several award-winning biographies, including those of Louis Armstrong, Al Capone, Irving Berlin, and James Agee. He has written for many national publications including Esquire and Newsweek, taught at the New School for Social Research, and served as Assistant to the President of the Museum of Television and Radio in New York. Bergreen has also served as a nonfiction judge for the National Book Awards and as a judge for the PEN/Albrand Nonfiction Award. Voyage to Mars is soon to be an NBC-TV television movie that will premier in spring 2002, and a weekly series that will debut in fall 2002. Bergreen lives in New York City.

Reviews

This volume would seem to have all the right ingredients: Bergreen's considerable biographical skills (Louis Armstrong, Capone, James Agee, etc.) applied to the epic tale of NASA's search for life on other worldsDMars in particularDthrough the eyes of its participants. Unfortunately, the result is flawed by Bergreen's axe-grinding, overstatement and apparent misunderstanding of science in theory and practice, especially with respect to the tug-of-war over the purported Martian fossils in a meteorite collected in Antarctica. Bergreen doesn't fairly present the evidence on both sides of the question. He characterizes those who dispute the initial conclusions (that the meteorite was a probable indication of life on Mars)Das a handful of old-guard scientists who have swayed the media to their side. In many places, the book is a paean to the uncommon work and dedication of Bergreen's protagonist, NASA scientist Jim Garvin, extending the adulation to Garvin's late thesis advisor Tim Mutch. Bergreen overstates the significance of Mutch's 1976 book, The Geology of Mars. "Geology claimed a gigantic new turf: the solar system," he writes, as if unaware that Eugene Shoemaker founded astrogeology two decades earlier. Shoemaker, a towering figure in planetary science, is never mentioned. Frequent errors that a scientifically astute reader would catch (such as attributing the molten state of the early Earth to radioactivity instead of the kinetic energy of colliding planetesimals) detract further from the book's credibility. (Nov. 1)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Difficult to classify, this book is in essence an account of NASA's last three Mars missions: Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Climate Orbiter, and Mars Polar Lander. It also includes some retrospective history of the Pathfinder Mission, as it affected the most recent missions. This is a wonderful, rambling, personal journey into the world of NASA and extraplanetary exploration, inviting the reader to join the author as an observer of the planning, the debates in the scientific community, and the execution of the missions. This is also a philosophical journey, speculating on the existence of life beyond Earth. Does life exist on the other planets in our solar system? How and under what conditions can life develop? How do we discover that life? And what does the discovery of life beyond Earth mean to us? A good read, Voyage to Mars cannot replace solid scientific books and histories of the various missions to Mars, but it will be an excellent addition to any library where the clientele is interested in space exploration or life on other plants. Bergreen is the author of several biographies, including As Thousands Cheer: The Life of Irving Berlin.DBetty Galbraith, Owen Science & Engineering Lib., Washington State Univ., Pullman
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A status report on the discoveries of NASA's Mars missions, following last year's twin failures of the Climate Orbiter and the Polar Lander, Bergreen's narrative necessarily defaults to the scientific haul of the one spacecraft still functioning at Mars, the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS). Since it aerobraked into its circular mapping orbit, that hardy craft has regularly made headlines: "Mars Had an Ocean"; "Mars Had Plate Tectonics"; "Water Might Still Flow on Mars." Bergreen gained entree to the geologists who interpreted the MGS data behind such announcements, particularly one named Jim Garvin. Such a buddy with Garvin is Bergreen that his tone of familiarity, as "Jim reminds me . . . " of some facet of Martian geology, creates doubts about his journalistic detachment. But his readers won't be J-school nags; they'll come from the broad popular interest in the Red Planet that follows every revelation, including those that have rejuvenated hopes of finding life there, extant or extinct. They will happily course through Bergreen's assemblage of recent developments and portraits of the scientists making them. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 157322166X
• ISBN 13: 9781573221665
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 480