Nonfiction Book Reviews

Death from the Skies by Philip Plait

I just finished Death From the Skies: These are the Ways the World will End by Philip Plait, and I have to say – I loved it.  I was originally turned on to Plait when I watched a B movie in the local planetarium based off his first book, Bad Astronomy.  Intrigued, I checked out Bad Astronomy and ended up giving it 4.5 stars on my old blog. It was good and full of interesting info, but I have to say: Plait definitely hit his stride with Death From the Skies.

First, an overview: Plait is a well-known astronomer who has been running a website called BadAstronomy.com for years, a website that gets millions of visitors every year. Apparently, I’m not the only one who’s interested in astronomy. Who knew?

In Death From the Skies, Plait looks at the multitude of ways that life on Earth (and more specifically, us humans) could die, from comets to gamma rays, and more.  He also looks at how the Sun is going to eventually die out, how the Milky Way Galaxy is going to merge with another galaxy, and how in trillions upon trillions of years from now, the Universe is eventually going to die out.

You would think that all of this death and destruction would make for a depressing book, but I have to give tribute to Plait’s fantastic writing style.  This book (death and destruction aside) can be laugh out loud funny at times.  Seriously.

At one point, Plait is talking about how the Sun is going to expand and contract and expand and contract, and how this is going to kill all life on Earth – not exactly all flowers and sunshine, right?  Well, through the use of footnotes, he injects some humor into the situation.  Here’s the quotation:

It’s entirely likely that in a few billion years, Earth will look very much as Venus does today: tremendously hot, and blanketed in a dense atmosphere composed almost entirely of carbon dioxide.

However, even that thick air will be lost to space over millions and billions of years.  By the time the Sun’s evolution brings it to the next chapter in its life, kicking it into overdrive, the Earth will be barren rock, devoid of any trace of atmosphere.  It will be utterly lifeless.

For those of you clinging to hope‡, there is some life that might survive this state of Earth’s distant future.

‡ My suggestion: let go.

Plait is doing this sort of thing constantly in the book.  Some other fun footnotes:

• “Like I said, black holes are weird.”
• “Get used to that.  Your common sense it going to take a beating here.”
• “That distance is about 700 million miles from the Earth, so you’ll be thrusting a long time: well over a thousand years.  Better pack a lunch.”
• “If you live in the northern hemisphere, that is.  For Australians, New Zealanders, and other upside-down people, reverse those directions.”

Starting to get the idea yet that this is not your typical dry astronomy book?  In case you missed it: this is not your typical dry astronomy book.  Plait writes in an extremely readable way, so that even a science dunce like me can understand what the heck he’s talking about.  He’s uses plenty of analogies that make sense (nothing’s worse than an author trying to explain a complicated subject by using a complicated analogy) and the humor gives the book a great punch.

You know the absolute best part of this book?  How much I learned without feeling like I was learning at all.  Some books are good for learning from, but you struggle throughout the book, pushing yourself to really focus and try to understand theories and topics that are quite frankly over your head.  It’s a struggle to finish that kind of book.

On the other hand, Death from the Skies was a gripping read.  I had a hard time putting it down (and in fact, I should have been packing and cleaning instead of reading, but when I weighed the two options, Death from the Skies won every time.  That never would have happened with The Forgotten Man, a book I’ve started four different times but have never managed to finish.  Now that is a dry book!)

Now comes the point in my review where I point out the things that you should watch for when reading Death – things that might bother you or that I feel detracted from the book.  The only thing I can think of is that anyone who doesn’t believe in evolution or the Big Bang Theory is probably not going to like this book.  Plait does not approach the discussion of the Universe from any sort of religious perspective whatsoever.  Everything is based on what science has discovered.

I happen to really like that, but I know that it would bother other people, so I wanted to put that caveat in there.

Other than that, I literally cannot think of a single drawback to this book.  It was full of incredibly complex information broken down into bite sized chunks; it had plenty of humor and analogies (and humorous analogies!), and it was interesting to read.  I am giving Death from the Skies a rare 5 out of 5 stars.

Havs
Who is waiting impatiently for Plait to write another book so she can spend another two days glued to her couch, nose stuck in the book…