An inspiring book about valuing and protecting our beautiful night skies and our ability to see and appreciate them.. ( )

As a dedicated visual astronomer, I found this book interesting. It would have been much better with illustrations. Keep looking up! ( )

Jo Marchant has written a fascinating and thought provoking tour of humankind’s relationship with the cosmos. Covering history, philosophy, religion, art and psychedelic drugs among other things, Marchant weaves together a compelling narrative. I’ve seen this book compared to Harari’s Sapiens. Both books tackle big questions and seek answers across diverse fields of thought.

For much of our history human beings have looked to the stars. We’ve imagined our gods living among them. We’ve looked up among them for signs and predictions, both for our societies and for ourselves. Science has shown that much of life on earth has evolved internal clocks that synchronize patterns of our behavior to the rhythms of the sun and moon. But today there are few stars visible from most cities, and we humans no longer look to the heavens for answers to our problems.

The Human Cosmos helps illuminate how our relationship to the wider universe has influenced humanity, and what we may be missing out on today - from an urban view of the stars themselves to a lack of understanding of the reality of life itself.

Looking across bookish websites I see that this book was widely praised as a top science book of 2020. It is certainly among the top books I’ve read this year. Five Stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ for The Human Cosmos. ( )

Not sure what my expectations were, but this book did not meet them. Sort of a rough catalogue of ways humanity used to look at the cosmos; why the way we look now fails us. I read maybe a third of the book and said - Not for me. Yes, we lost our connection to the stars and the night sky - but why was that connection important? how do we get it back? These questions are either not addressed or buried among pages of peripheral details.

For all of Man’s time on Earth, the skies have played an outsized role. In a remarkable and engrossing book called The Human Cosmos, Jo Tarant has gathered evidence from all of history and before, demonstrating the deep penetration and influence of the cosmos on the way Man thinks, behaves, and believes. The result is a literary journey unlike any other I have read. It is so varied and yet so deep, it makes the reader want to plow into each subject she tackles even more. Whether it’s archaeology, paleontology, space travel or the invention of timekeeping, Tarant has a story to tell, and it’s always a stunning one, complete with citations, side trips and other perspectives. Including her own.

Many of the chapters manage to bloom around a central character. In Art, it is Kandinsky. In Power, it is Tom Paine. Paine, for example was a poor failure of an Englishman who gambled his last pennies on a one-way trip to the American Colonies (on Ben Franklin’s recommendation). When he arrived, he was at death’s door. He survived, and this self-trained corset-maker became the world’s most popular author, and not just once. His influence on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution can be seen loud and clear.

Similarly, Tarant frames chapters on the lives of inventors, academics and theorists who changed the knowledge base, or created a new discipline, or failed miserably in the effort. It’s a very human interest kind of book for one with such a literally lofty title.

Tarant divides her chapters into values, 12 of them. Each one takes a common aspect of human lives and humanity itself, and demonstrates with fascinating stories, theories and citations how the heavens have lit the way. They have simple one-word titles like Oceans, Faith and Mind, that allow her to gather a wealth of facts and present them as cohesive narratives. Each one is a standalone adventure, hooked to the stars. For Tarant, this extends to all living things, like proving that birds navigate by the Earth’s magnetic field, that dung beetles navigate by moonlight, and that butterflies navigate by the sun. Plants clearly rely on the sun for all they do.

She begins with the caves of Lascaux in France, where some kids discovered great halls of wall and ceiling paintings, peppered with star groups of the Pleiades and constellations as they then were and as men saw them. Prehistoric Man already had a sophisticated appreciation of the sun, moon and stars.

It is not a far trip to seeing and understanding the positioning of massive mounds in Ireland, Solstice clocks like Stonehenge, and how up to date the Ancient Greeks were in their understanding of how the world fit into the universe. Even the pyramids were aimed accurately and precisely due north. Man has always been about leveraging position using the heavens.

In Babylonia 3000 years ago, they were already mapping eclipses and recording moon and star movements for predictive purposes. In fact, the emperor was a knowledge junkie who collected clay tablets with everything that everyone knew from the entire known world. They survived because the fire that destroyed their capital, Nineveh, baked them into lasting for three thousand years until Nineveh was rediscovered and excavated, just in our lifetimes.

In Ancient Greece, they had pretty much figured it all out, calculating that the Earth must be round. In Rome, the Emperor Constantine, despite converting to Christianity and forcing his empire to as well, nonetheless put the sun on his coins and classified himself as the Sun Emperor.

Tarant dallies in the Constantine era to show how the stars made their way into Christianity. Christmas was chosen for the rather pagan date when the sun begins its track north again, four days after the winter solstice. Nothing whatever to do with the birth of Jesus, who was more likely to have been born in March. Easter, the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox, was a play to co-opt every other religion of the time, the sun-focused, the moon-focused as well as the Christians. Actual historical events played no role. Christianity was in competition for the hearts and souls of all, and the others had long-established winter and spring festivals. So Christianity had to exploit them too.

Yahweh long predates modern Judaism. He was already a God, but he had a wife, Asherah, and an active role among numerous Gods the Israelites worshipped. Some scholars cite Yahweh as a Sun God. After the Babylonians destroyed the Jewish kingdom in 586 BC, the religion started up again in 538 BC, this time with the help of the invading Persians. The new, updated Jewish religion combined the old stories with Zoroastrian influences from the Persians, who assisted in the rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem. But most importantly, this time it was with just one God, Yahweh, who could not be seen or even described. It was the greatest innovation in the history of religion, and changed the course of Western everything.

Five hundred years earlier, Babylonian astronomers were so busy with the stars that they divided up the sky into 12 equal sections, each one named for something easy to remember, like the constellations Aquarius or Gemini, solidifying the images the stars inspired. It was purely a housekeeping effort, so that astronomers could narrow the areas they were talking about and pointing to. But it soon went completely off the rails as people demanded to know how the position of the stars would affect their very being. So they made up great stories and attributed them to the planets and the constellations. It became big business. Even Galileo did horoscopes as a sideline.

At each stage, Tarant colors in the details with great stories of stumbling discoveries, unintended consequences, dramatic failure, and world-changing success. And everything is connected to our fascination with the stars. It quickly becomes remarkable as to just how pervasive this has been.

There is a great chapter on the oceans and how Man navigated using the sun and the moon, but particularly the stars. The Polynesians navigated completely differently from the Europeans, learning the whole Pacific Ocean and guiding themselves with stunning accuracy by the positions of stars, particularly at dusk as they first became visible. Captain Cook, the featured biography in the chapter, spent his time messing with sextants and trying to map the islands he visited, all with less accuracy and success than the natives, armed with nothing at all.

The invention of time is obviously a complex function of sun and moon, and the implications for recognizing time of day and time of year are world-changing events and trends. This also manages to circle back into religion, as the Egyptians, long before the Christians, already appreciated death and resurrection. Their Sun God, Ra, died every evening and was resurrected every morning.

Moving up to the present, Tarant describes the starry contributions of physics and quantum mechanics, and our latest fixation, space travel. Space has changed a number of astronauts for life, and not just because of time-shifting or weightlessness. When they get their first total view of the universe or the planet Earth, they are awestruck. A number of them have tried to explain how it has changed their lives. It has left them humbled. They sign their names smaller. They have a far keener appreciation of ecology and pollution. And of what really matters. As Apollo 14’s Edgar Mitchell put it: “From out there on the moon, international politics looks so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck, drag him a quarter of a million miles out, and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.’”

The business of awe is something that changes people for the better. It calms them, takes away anxiety and depression, and puts everything in perspective. It makes them feel secure and part of something much larger and special. But you can’t do that on television; you have to experience it directly and be overwhelmed by nature. Between tv, computers and smartphones, there just isn’t enough awe going around, which Tarant says contributes to the state of Man today: tense, anxious, fearful and depressed.

Tarant says we have lost our connection to the stars along with the inspiration they provide. GPS has replaced even printed maps. There is no challenge, no adventure any more. Everything is onscreen, a very limited view of the universe of infinite things. Light pollution has long eliminated easy views of the Milky Way, leaving most people with only handful of the brightest stars in the sky. For many in the Far East, pollution permanently clouds the skies so they don’t even see that it is a lovely blue. We have abandoned our bearings in favor of a dirty technological substitute, she says.

Ultimately, the book is about losing the connection. For as long as there have been humans, they have looked to the skies for inspiration, support, pleasure and satisfaction. Now suddenly, in the latest speck of time, say 100 years, Man has separated from the skies. Just as he has separated himself from the ecological system, he is well into denying the influence of the stars. And he is far less contented for it.

David Wineberg ( )