American Eclipse: A Nation's Epic Race to Catch the Shadow of the Moon and Win the Glory of the World. This item is unavailable.American Eclipse: A Nation's Epic Race to Catch the Shadow of the Moon and Win the Glory of the World

Finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Prize for Literary Science Writing
Winner of the AIP Science Communication Award
An Amazon Best Book of the Year (Science)
A St. Louis Post-Dispatch Best Book of the Year
Finalist for the Colorado Book Award (Nonfiction)
Booklist Editors’ Choice (Science & Technology)

Featuring a new afterword priming readers for the total solar eclipse of 2024, this “essential” (BBC) account brilliantly captures the celestial and human drama of eclipses.

With this “suspenseful narrative history” (Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air), award-winning science writer David Baron tells the story of the enterprising scientists―among them, planet hunter James Craig Watson, pioneering astronomer Maria Mitchell, and ambitious young inventor Thomas Edison―who raced to Wyoming and Colorado in the summer of 1878, at the dawn of the Gilded Age, to observe the first great American eclipse. Thrillingly recreating the fierce jockeying of these nineteenth-century astronomers, Baron draws on years of “exhaustive research to reconstruct a remarkable chapter of U.S. history” (Lee Billings, Scientific American), when the fate of American science still hung precariously in the balance. Now updated with an afterword that unites eclipses and eclipse-chasers past and present―revisiting the total solar eclipse of 2017 and looking forward to that of 2024―American Eclipse reveals the enduring power of these ethereal events to bring people together across space and time.

8 pages of photographs; 65 illustrations; 1 map

David Baron is an award-winning journalist, broadcaster, and author of The Beast in the Garden and American Eclipse. A former science correspondent for NPR, he has also written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Scientific American, and other publications. David recently served as the Baruch S. Blumberg NASA/Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology, Exploration, and Scientific Innovation. He lives in Boulder, Colorado.