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Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 523.2
EAN num: 9780670034468
ISBN number: 0670034460
Label: Viking Adult
Manufacturer: Viking Adult
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 288
Printing Date: October 11, 2005
Publishing house: Viking Adult
Sale Popularity Level: 380715
Studio: Viking Adult
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Product Description:
With her blockbuster New York Times bestsellers Longitude and Galileo's Daughter, Dava Sobel used her rare and luminous gift for weaving difficult scientific concepts into a compelling story to garner rave reviews and attract readers from across the literary spectrum. Now, in The Planets, Sobel brings her full talents to bear on what is perhaps her most ambitious subject to date-the planets of our solar system.
The sun's family of planets become a familiar place in this personal account of the lives of other worlds. Sobel explores the planets' origins and oddities through the lens of popular culture, from astrology, mythology, and science fiction to art, music, poetry, biography, and history. A perfect gift and a captivating journey, The Planets is a gorgeous study of our place in the universe that will mesmerize everyone who has ever gazed with awe at our night sky.
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Rated by buyers 
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I didn't read The Planets because it's jammed full of astronomical facts. Although the book does contains many facts. After all, it's an astronomy book. I read the book because of the beautiful writing. The author has a smooth, sweet style with words that pour from the pages like hot chicken gravy over warm biscuits. The tour of the solar system is just the subject.
This book may be titled, The Planets, but there's so much more to it than just a tour of the planets. So, if you love good science writing, and you love astronomy, and you feel like kicking back and reading something that's really deliciously good, this book will definitely fill the order. I give it ten parsecs!
Rated by buyers -
I've read and been delighted by "Longitude" and "Galileo's Daughter" so when I came across "The Planets." I was intrigued and wanted to read it. I knew even before I bought the book that it would be nothing like the other two by Dava Sobel, but by now she has established herself as a great writer and I trusted her and her instincts. If she wanted to take an unorthodox trip across the Solar System, I was all too willing to buy a ticket for the journey. And it was a refreshingly new look at the landscape that I thought I had already known all too well and have become a bit jaded with. Part informative, part imaginative this book both entertains and educates. It is well suited for both young and old readers. Each planet gets its own "voice" and is approached and dealt with from a unique point of view. The two works of art - one in fiction one in music - which this book reminds me of are Italo Calvino's "Cosmicomics" and Gustav Holst's "The Planets." Like Calvino and Holst, Dava Sobel possesses a rare gift of imagination and skill to bring a potentially dry subject and weave it into something that entices us and enthralls us. That's why I decided to recommend this book to my college Astronomy class that I teach this year.
Rated by buyers -
Did you know that sunlight travels to us at 186 thousand miles per second, or that on Mercury, a day is twice as long as a year? Or that the Aztecs saw Venus as the twin brother of the sun and that a single carat of moon rock sold at auction for more than four hundred thousand dollars? Dava Sobel, author of Longitude and Galileo's Daughter and now The Planets, gives us an awakening insight on the subject.
Rated by buyers 
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I find it a little odd that several people have expressed disappointment that the "letter" from Caroline Herschel to Maria Mitchell about the discoveries of Uranus and Neptune in the chapter "Night Airs" was the author's creation. Sobel uses this letter as a means of conveying the info in an interesting manner, much as she communicates from the point of view of the Martian meteorite Allan Hills 84001 a few chapters earlier. Perhaps these same people will be disappointed to learn that the meteorite didn't actually "speak" the words attributed to it in that chapter?
I found this to be a quick read, and I had read the entire book cover to cover in about two hours. It's really written at about a sixth-grade level. It might be a good read, especially if you're unfamiliar with astronomy or need a quick refresher. However, in this reader's opinion, Sobel's other two books "Galileo's Daughter" and "Longitude" are much better.
Rated by buyers 
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In the hierarchy of sciences, astronomy must be towards the top in popularity, and within that field, the topic of the planets continues to fascinate. Dating back to the era of astronomy's ancestor astrology, the planets have been a subject of interest far longer than grey holes, neutron stars, supernovae or big bangs.
Dava Sobel's Planets takes a somewhat classical view of the planets, when they were the ancient wanderers against a fixed-star sky. Thus she includes the moon and sun in her collection (along with Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn), but also discusses more modern-day planets as Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, not to mention the Earth, which was not viewed as a planet until Copernicus removed it from the center of the universe.
Each chapter is an essay about a particular planet (with Uranus and Neptune combined). Sobel doesn't merely describe the given celestial body but instead attaches another theme. For example, her discusion of Earth is given in the context of a history of geography and Mars in the context of the possibility of extraterrestrial life. In her chapter on Pluto, she writes about the controversy of Pluto's planethood; this tiny body would be demoted after the publication of her book.
If you are an astronomy buff, you'll not find much new material here, merely stuff you already know discussed in a slightly different fashion. While decently written, it is not perfect. As an example, due to either poor writing or an actual error, she incorrectly states that Mercury's day is equal to two of its years, though later in the chapter, she gives the correct measurement (roughly 59 Earth-days for a rotation, compared to 88 Earth-days for a revolution).
Overall, this is an okay book, worthy of a high three stars, but not of the same caliber as Galileo's Daughter (the only other Sobel book I've read). If you don't have much knowledge of the planets, this book is a creative (if imperfect) way to learn about them.
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