Newspaper Article

A passion for science Author Frederik Pohl takes readers on an engaging, enthusiastic journey through his favorite subject

Jeff Lyon Jeff Lyon is the Tribune's deputy Tempo editor, co

2001

Overview

[Frederik Pohl] further lards his narrative with the gleanings of his 60- year personal scientific quest. He gives an unforgettable account of watching a total eclipse of the sun with hundreds of other goggle- eyed passengers on a cruise ship in Hawaii. He takes you from Mt. Etna in Sicily to Stonehenge in England, from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to the Very Large Array of mobile radio telescopes in Socorro, N.M., and from the Great Barrier Reef and its corals off the coast of Australia to the Chinese city of Chengdu, with its 2,200- year-old marvel of an irrigation system. You travel from Kentucky's Mammoth Cave to Capri's Blue Grotto, from Pompeii in Italy to Machu Picchu in Peru, even to Russia's Star City, where cosmonauts train, all the while following in the restless footsteps of Pohl, who appears to have been everywhere (not to mention having seen everything; he tells us he was in Seattle on May 18, 1980, when nearby Mt. St. Helen's erupted, and at a 1986 meeting in the Kremlin when, under the approving eye of Mikhail Gorbachev, the apostle of glasnost, or openness in discussing social problems, Soviet writers arose one by one to tongue-lash their nation as foreign visitors gaped in disbelief).

• Publisher: Tribune Publishing Company, LLC
• Subject: Books-titles / Chasing Science: Science as Spectator Sport / Nonfiction / Pohl, Frederik / Science