The Human Relationship with the Stars

From the earliest times men have looked at the stars and wondered. In pre-history the stars were seen as gods. As the understanding of the cosmos increased, the stars were studied and gradually relegated to a physical part of the universe. This excellent book traces the human understanding of the sky through the science of each period.

While I thought I knew a reasonable amount about astronomy, I learned something new in each chapter. One of the big surprises was how the Polynesians navigated. Instead of plotting their course from Pacific island to island, they memorized a star route. It allowed them to travel great distances without the sophisticated instruments used by the Europeans.

The book isn’t restricted to cosmology as such. It also covers art and mythology in relation to humans trying to understand their place in the universe. The author did an excellent job of making this book, that contains a great deal of technical information, understandable by the general reader.

Probably the most important point the author makes is that through millennia we have separated ourselves from the stars, from the universe and from nature. This is a very undesirable outcome of our search for ever more technological solutions to our problems. If this book does nothing else, I hope it awakens us to what we are in danger of losing by studying our electronic screens instead of the night sky.

I received this book from Dutton for this review.

The Human Cosmos is an overview of humanity’s relationship with the night sky — from groupings of dots in the cave paintings at Lascaux that can be interpreted as constellations to the awe-filled experiences of astronauts at the International Space Station as they perform their first spacewalks — and in an incredibly wide-ranging and consistently fascinating variety of historical anecdotes, author Jo Marchant makes a solid case that the more we have relegated the study of the stars to scientists alone, the more we have lost something of what made us human in the first place. I loved every bit of this.