BY DAVA SOBEL, Saturday, November 17, 2007 12:01 a.m.
In the just under 100 pages of "The Accidental Indies," Robert Finley uses the tools of poetry to describe Columbus's trip westward--perhaps the most familiar of all journeys of discovery--and thereby cracks open the nature of wanderlust and destiny. Finley's Columbus is a man "immune to distances," who thrives on "that greatest of opiates, the here, here, here in there." The moment the ships set sail, Finley invokes the second person to thrust the reader aboard, to feel "the first gentle lift and fall of the dark hull under your feet. And with it the world falls away from you . . . like a word you have spoken," while "a lightness and a loneliness gather under your heart." All the way across the ocean, the compass rose flowers on the page.
Chet Raymo turns a mile-long wooded path--from his house to Stonehill College in Easton, Mass., where he is a professor emeritus of physics--into a crucible for all his acquired knowledge of the world. On a wooden bridge over a brook, he stops to consider "the algae scum, the fiddleheads, the ducks, the turtles, the gush of life," but then Raymo, who is also an astronomer, turns his thoughts to a view of the Atlantic from 30,000 feet and an appreciation of Earth as Water Planet. He traces the source of water back to the origin of the universe and ponders the properties of ice and the effect of cloud-cover on global climate. And he praises the world's "quintillions of tons of life-giving water"--some of which he watches "purl in languorous eddies under the plank bridge across Queset Brook."
This thrill-a-minute account of NASA's Apollo program speaks to two distinct audiences: those who (like me) avidly followed every launch and vicariously set foot on the moon in 1969, and those who were born too late to do so. The beauty of Andrew Chaikin's approach is his focus on the most important features of each Apollo mission, sparing our having to return repeatedly to the launch pad or wander in a welter of technical details. At the outset, the program's worst accident unfolds in undiminished horror. No, not Apollo 13 ("Houston, we have a problem"), ultimately a triumph, fully captured here, but Apollo 1, in which astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee burned to death while performing a simulated countdown in a test capsule atop an unfueled rocket. Although one of the Apollo veterans recalls the moon as "really a very uninviting place," Chaikin insists that "the significant journey takes place not in their minds, but in ours."
Dorothy Middleton chronicles the days when English women who journeyed abroad by themselves did so in skirts, even while "swarming up a rope ladder" or shooting rapids. The seven "globe trotteresses" treated in "Victorian Lady Travellers" shared "a love of escape" that took them everywhere. Each had her reasons--and the means--for going. Thus naturalist and artist Marianne North painted the world's tropical vegetation (in 800 works permanently on display at Kew Gardens), and nurse Kate Marsden penetrated the forests of Siberia by sledge and on horseback to find and minister to outcast lepers. Middleton's excellent study of these women is enhanced by her intimacy with their letters and diaries as well as their published memoirs.
When Nicolaus Copernicus's "On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres" was published in 1543, most people believed that the Earth sat motionless at the center of the universe. Even after Copernicus declared that our planet circled the sun, the world was slow to agree--so slow that it seemed as if he and his seminal book had been largely ignored. But historian Owen Gingerich proves otherwise in a quirky, enlightening account of the 30 years he spent traversing the world in search of "On the Revolutions." He eventually uncovers more than 600 16th-century copies, many of them crammed with comments penned in the margins by Copernicus's contemporaries. It turns out that everybody read "On the Revolutions"; they just couldn't accept what it said. Today the book is still popular, and more expensive than ever, with copies selling at astronomical prices (around $1 million apiece). Copernicus appeals to thieves, too, and Gingerich describes his courtroom appearances to help identify some of the stolen books.