Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Tuesday August 10, 2010
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VOYAGER: Seeking Newer Worlds in the Third Great Age of Discovery
Stephen J. Pyne
Viking
ISBN 978 0 670 02183 3
444 pages
$29.95
Reviewed by Marcia Bartusiak
For those 30 or younger, the journey is now ancient history, having originated before they were born. As summer was coming to an end in 1977, two spacecraft were launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla., outfitted with a bevy of instruments to take a grand tour of the outer planets. NASA was taking advantage of a planetary alignment that comes only once every 176 years. Stephen Pyne chose now to write about these probes, Voyager 1 and 2, because he views them as potent symbols of a third great age of discovery.
The earlier eras were forged by European rivalries -- first the great oceanic explorations during the Renaissance and then more scientific ventures in the 18th and 19th centuries, such as Darwin's voyage on the Beagle. But the third epoch transcends "anything humanity has known before," Pyne writes. "It would reach beyond sordid politics and the blinkered ambitions of its originating time and place."
That's a weighty mantle for Voyager to wear, I thought upon starting the book. Why not choose, as the avatars of this age, the robots roving over Martian deserts or the Apollo program that took men to the Moon? Pyne, an environmental historian at Arizona State University, answers that question -- and much more -- in this fascinating and beautifully written chronicle. Much like Ferdinand Magellan's bold, world-spanning journey, Voyager was one of those "moments of exploring that ... fuse place, time, discovery, and yearning." The Apollo program, contends the author, "went nowhere, withdrawing to the virtual solipsism of the space shuttle and a near-Earth space station." But the Voyagers found new moons, planetary rings, erupting volcanoes and potential sites for extraterrestrial life. It was the grand gesture.
Despite the title, "Voyager" is not a detailed, straightforward account of the project. What makes this book unique is Pyne's combination of history and philosophy as he reflects on the role of exploration in human society. Throughout its pages, the Voyagers' passage through the solar system is compared and contrasted with terrestrial expeditions of the past. Even the most passionate aficionado, who devoured every digital bit sent back by the Voyagers, will find this overview enriching.
Occasionally a comparison can be prosaic (in volume, each Voyager was roughly equivalent to Columbus' Nina), but more often they are poetic and engaging. A Voyager rounding Jupiter, for example, is likened to Vasco de Gama's swing around the Cape of Good Hope. Only this time we found "hurricanes the size of Earth's Moon that lasted for centuries; stormy eddies that roiled past like boiling Mississippis; trade winds that would shred and crush sailing ships." De Gama caught the austral westerlies to hurl him past Africa; the Voyagers were boosted gravitationally as they sailed from planet to planet.
Once Voyager 1 flew past Jupiter and Saturn, it headed out of the solar system. It was Voyager 2 that completed the full grand tour, arriving at Uranus in 1985 and Neptune in 1989, so far out that it took four hours for its data to reach Earth. Remembering only the glorious images, I was surprised to learn how close the Voyagers came to disaster in flight -- jammed platforms, misdirected antennas, failed receivers -- all either fixed or worked around by ingenious engineers. For that matter, before launch some scientists argued against including cameras at all, believing them a waste of payload. Thankfully, others prevailed, perhaps taking a lesson from the second age of discovery, when Thomas Moran's stunning paintings of Mammoth Hot Springs helped push Congress to declare Yellowstone a national park. Those remaining home want "not just shared data but shared meaning: not merely the eyes of discovery but its poetry," writes Pyne.
According to Pyne, the golden era of the third age is now turning to silver, where more focused work replaces inspiration: The Magellan probe goes to Venus, Galileo to Jupiter, Cassini to Saturn. What comes next is difficult to predict: Perhaps millions will gain the opportunity to virtually explore, as technology progresses. Or maybe there will be renewed competition among spacefaring nations, harking back to the first age.
Whatever the outcome, the Voyagers are still on the job. Now past Pluto, the stalwart pair are "sounding" the depths of space and have enough power to send back their findings until 2020. Only last year the probes detected the presence of magnetic fields that are holding together an interstellar cloud, through which the solar system is now passing.
Hardly ancient history after all.
Marcia Bartusiak is executive director of the MIT Graduate Program in Science Writing. Her latest book is "The Day We Found the Universe," on the birth of modern cosmology.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE LAST OF THE TRIBE: The Epic Quest to Save a Lone Man in the Amazon
Monte Reel
Scribner
ISBN 978 1 4165 9474 1
271 pages
$26
Reviewed by Matthew Shaer
In the early fall of 1996, a team of Brazilian government workers descended into the jungle of the Guapore River Valley, a tangled tract of Amazonia known to locals as the "Green Hell." They eventually emerged with photographic evidence of a lean, mustachioed Indian man who lived alone on the valley floor, apparently the only remaining member of a vanquished jungle tribe. As Monte Reel notes in his gripping new book, "The Last of the Tribe," this "spectral wild man" was one of the few modern examples of a human being "existing within a vacuum of complete solitude, day after day, week after week, year after year, without the companionship of another soul, without any communication whatsoever." The bulk of "Tribe" follows the efforts of a hardy group of conservationists who fight to protect the Indian from the incursions of loggers.
Reel, a former South America correspondent for The Washington Post, is good with the context -- the section on official Brazilian policy toward indigenous people is powerful and sad -- but he's best when he's indulging in good old-fashioned adventure-writing: Arrows fly, poisonous snakes writhe through the undergrowth, and sinister ranchers lord over the boomtowns of Brazil's Wild West. The real star here turns out to be the Amazon itself, a place thick with "irrepressible" flora and a "gaudy display" of fauna -- a place, in short, that is "neither paradise nor perdition."
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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