Starborn
How the Stars Made Us (and Who We Would Be Without Them)
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2.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
An astronomer "who writes like a poet" (Wall Street Journal) gives a sweeping, "beautifully written" (Nature) inquiry into how the night sky has shaped human history
For as long as humans have lived, we have lived beneath the stars. But under the glow of today’s artificial lighting, we have lost the intimacy our ancestors once shared with the cosmos.
In Starborn, cosmologist Roberto Trotta reveals how stargazing has shaped the course of human civilization. The stars have served as our timekeepers, our navigators, our muses—they were once even our gods. How radically different would we be, Trotta also asks, if our ancestors had looked up to the night sky and seen… nothing? He pairs the history of our starstruck species with a dramatic alternate version, a world without stars where our understanding of science, art, and ourselves would have been radically altered.
Revealing the hidden connections between astronomy and civilization, Starborn summons us to the marvelous sight that awaits us on a dark, clear night—to lose ourselves in the immeasurable vastness above.
Customer Reviews
Too much politics
While the book starts off with some intriguing concepts, such as how society would be different if we could never see the sky, it bogs down with topics that are well covered in other tomes. I started to get perturbed in the section chastising European explorers for being settler colonists, and then gave up entirely when he introduced the James Webb telescope with a brief hint that James Webb MAY have been homophobic and a short rant on cis-gendered white male astronomers. The author seems too caught up in his identity politics and less interested in science to me.