This review contains affiliate links, which earn me a small commission when you click and purchase, at no extra cost to you. Thank you for supporting my small business and allowing me to continue providing you a reliable resource for clean book ratings.
Our moon (Luna) has been a source of wonder for humankind as long as there has been humankind to gaze into the sky. Probably every person who has seen this orb has been curious to some degree about its background and composition. Those of us who were fortunate enough to have televisions during the Apollo years did not mind missing sleep, school, or work from time to time to witness our species’ first few steps toward exploring this adjunct world.
Social media of all flavors continues to offer a regular stream of images, videos, and poetry centered around our planet’s largest satellite, easily granting it superstar status. People just cannot get enough of this pockmarked planet.
David Warmflash has gathered a tremendous amount of historical sources and distilled them for our present-day reading enjoyment in Moon. In fact, these 100 mini-essays are just perfect for the 21st-century constantly distracted learner. Each one is exactly one page, with an accompanying image, and a few references for those who need a little more. The prose is so very smooth and readable; the only problems are when there are too many names, or too many acronyms. Thus a few topics are less easy to wade through.
I am superficially familiar with a lot of the background of moon study over the ages, and I believe this is a complete (albeit brief) overview of the development of thinking over the millennia of human history. Everything and everybody is here, warts and all. Political and religious machinations during the early and mid-centuries of the Common Era had the moon assuming all manner of occupations.
Once the basic science was agreed upon, the 20th century brought about its own problems of exploration, again with politics playing a frustratingly major role. The author did very well in his attempts to write objectively about many of these issues, but once the narrative hit the 1950s, I found some pretty clear bias in many of his monographs. That is all I have to say about that.
The artwork selected to support these compositions is absolutely stupendous. Photographs, drawings, sketches, illustrations — all were chosen well and genuinely enhanced the text. Each is unique, and much less familiar than the usual Wikipedia-level images the public is used to seeing. This alone represents some incredible effort somewhere, especially for those works that had to have come from historically less-open societies. Bravo!
The annotated bibliography must be mentioned as well. It is not overwhelming; rather, it is another well-conceived section that is simplistic in its design and therefore exceedingly useful to the reader who would like to explore further (like me). I found it so refreshing that I was offered only two or three sources per topic, rather than seemingly endless lists of esoteric publications in teeny-tiny print. Thank you so much!
I wholeheartedly recommend Moon: An Illustrated History to anyone who has a lasting interest in understanding our quiet little neighbor in the sky.
Rated: None.
Click here to purchase your copy of Moon: An Illustrated History on Amazon.
