Courtesy of Cambridge University Press (who published a book that Jack Brandt and I wrote called “Visions of the Cosmos“) I got a nice box of books in the mail last week. The first one is Evolution, edited together by Frederick Burkhardt, Samantha Evans, and Alison Pearn, with a forward by Sir David Attenborough, and contains selected letters of Charles Darwin. I look forward to reading Darwin’s thoughts as he traveled. It’s important to understand the thought process of the man whose work began our search to figure out how and why species on Earth have evolved over time.
The next one I got was An Introduction to Space Weather. I’ve been working with MIT’s Haystack Observatory on a series of videos about space weather, and it’s always nice to have another reference book on hand. I’ll probably take this one on a plane trip to read (yes, I’m that whack).
The third book I ordered is a nice update of an old favorite, the Cambridge Illustrated Dictionary of Astronomy. My older copy (signed by the author herself) is well-thumbed and much-used. I browsed through this new edition and it looks wonderful! Will I sit and read it? Yes, probably so. After all, I’m the kid who once spent a summer reading the encyclopedia in our family library!
