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Then Mike got sick and died, and Seager, now a widow and mother of two, took off. The relentless swing of her grief makes the reading heartbreaking. “Hour by hour,” she wrote, “I felt either broken or bulletproof. Over time, a group of six other widows, meeting every other Friday, “moving from house to house like emotional squatters,” gradually helped Seager return to the world.
The second half of her story is shimmering with ideas about what it means to lose a partner in their forties, and just as widows made Seager feel less alone, her story is sure to help any reader struggling with a similar loss. . “When you lose someone,” she wrote, “you don’t all lose them all at once, and their death doesn’t end with their death. You lose them a thousand times in a thousand ways. You say a thousand farewells. You organize a thousand funerals.
Johnson’s “Sirens of Mars” oscillates between a history of the science of Mars and an account of the author’s own journey as a planetary scientist in search of sparks of life in the vastness. It features effective miniatures of astronomers like Percival Lowell, who popularized the idea of visible “channels” on Mars as evidence of an alien civilization; Carl Sagan, who suggested that large turtle-like organisms “are not only possible on Mars; they can be favored ”; and Maria Zuber, the only female among 87 investigators on the 1996 Mars Global Surveyor science team. Along the way, you learn to appreciate the astonishing ingenuity it takes to safely dispatch rovers the size of Mini Coopers hundreds of millions of kilometers in a frozen vacuum cleaner, land them on another planet and circulate them at a distance.
The most fascinating memories are Johnson’s memories of formative times, as a young girl prowling the roads in search of fossils with her father, as a wide-eyed graduate student entering Jet Propulsion for the first time. Laboratory (“It was sacred to be in those rooms”) and as a marveling young scientist in Copenhagen holding bacterial cells 20,000 times her age in her hands. Johnson remembers feeling weird when, in her sophomore year, she attended a Zuber lecture. “My back straightened when it became clear what I was responding to,” she wrote. “It was the first time that I had heard a woman speak on planetary science.”
If Johnson’s prose swirls with lyrical wonder, as varied and multicolored as apricot deserts, butterscotch skies and blue Mars sunsets, Seager’s is increasingly raw, full of blues. and blacks, written in ink of grief, suffering, healing and – ultimately – clarity. In Seager’s hands, you’re as inclined to learn more about “a special body bag designed to slide down the stairs” as you are about rogue storm-ravaged exoplanets raining molten iron.
The two books magnificently dramatize the emotional precariousness of a career linked to the fate of space material. Both address the challenge of being female physicists in a male-dominated field, and both convey the struggle to operate in the vast scales of the universe to work, and then to return home to operate on the larger scale. humble of the domestic sphere. “I was constantly torn in two, always a form of distraction,” writes Seager. Johnson, after spending his day at work tending to a Mars rover millions of miles away, hurries to pick up his children from preschool. “It’s almost impossible to leave,” she said, “one love tears me apart from another.”
Spoiler alert: Neither book ends with the exhilarating discovery of alien life. In Johnson’s final pages, you find yourself spiraling through Herodotus and Euclid; in Seager, you watch her learn to love again. But these are not disappointments – on the contrary, their testimonies are a reminder that we are all part of a continuum of investigation that stretches back through the Enlightenment to Ibn al-Haytham, Aryabhata and Aristotle, human ties in chains. centuries of questions.
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