John Gribbin
Destination Moon
Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth
By Robert Poole
Yale University Press 236pp £18.99 order from our bookshop
This is a great idea for a book, but imperfectly executed; witness the irritating use of a partially italicized title. Robert Poole’s uncontentious theme is that humankind’s (he prefers ‘man’s’) view of ourselves and our home in the Universe was altered by the images of the Earth from space, especially those obtained by the Apollo astronauts. The image of the Earth rising over the horizon of the barren Moon, shining like a blue marble (or, in Carl Sagan’s words, a ‘pale blue dot’), adorned many students’ bedrooms in the 1970s, and helped to provide the impetus for the Green movement. It is a story worth telling, but it deserves a better treatment than this.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Take advantage of our Spring offer today. Try 3 issues for £5.
Use code 'SPRING3FOR5' at checkout.
https://www.mymagazinesub.co.uk/literary-review/promo/spring3for5/
'The unisexual roster saves us from diatribes about the iniquity of the male gaze, and in any case the female gaze is capable of retaliating by aestheticising and eroticising the bodies of men.'
Peter Conrad on @markcousinsfilm's new documentary.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/lets-get-this-show-on-the-road
Dethier 'writes about mud buildings without the telltale modulations other critics use to distance so-called vernacular construction from the canon of high architecture.'
Building with earth may be the future, says @PhinHarper.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/build-brown-go-green