Kuu: Maan kiehtova seuralainen

by Scott L. Montgomery, Jorma Keskitalo (Translator)

Olen viimeisin Kuussa kävellyt ihminen, mutta toivon ja uskon, että tämän kirjan kertomus ei jää lopulliseksi. Palaamme pian kävelylle Kuuhun ja sieltä uskaltaudumme vielä kauemmaksi avaruuteen. Uteliaisuus on ihmisen olemassaolon keskeinen piirre, ja tutkimus on aina ollut osa ihmisyyttä. Avaruustutkimus on riski, jonka ottamiseen meidän on oltava valmiit.

- Komentaja Gene Cernan, Apollo 17

Genres: Nonfiction, History Of Science, History, Astronomy

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1999

Reviews

[Lou Corn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Delightful but cursory and limited at times. I appreciated the ending ruminations. “It is a dream from which we will never wake. Our first and nearest vision in the heavens shall always be our closest companion.” And yet! “This world was a wholly alien, distant place, unlike anything found in the terrestrial domain.”

[Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

I just finished reading this book. Some of the reviews have praised the book as 'accessible' and 'a pleasure to read.' For me, it was a real struggle, as I found the language impenetrable and the history difficult to assimilate. I suppose it's partly my own fault--when I began the book I expected and wanted a book focusing on the astronomical history of the moon, but that's not what it is. Astronomy is part of the book, of course, but even as the telescope begins to play a major part, the fact is that this is a cultural history of how mankind has come to understand the moon over the centuries.

Interestingly, one of my takeaways from the book is how societies accumulated knowledge before the advent of moveable type. European history tended to lean more toward the textual, while the Middle East leaned toward the visual. That's probably why such a great scientist of the Middle East as Alhazen (aka al-Haytham) is little known in the West. I was left with the impression that the mass production of printed matter came at the expense of other mediums, especially the visual.

The core of the book describes the work of men who made pioneering observations of the moon, and why their lunar art was significant in moving our knowledge forward. But here is where the textual medium eventually broke down. Although the book is filled with illustrations, the book doesn't show all the works described (possibly for reasons beyond the author's control), and none are in color. A number of key artworks are not available in the book, so readers are on their own to find these works and compare them with the author's descriptions.

Imagine you've never seen the Mona Lisa, and the only way you can experience it is through someone else's written description. The writing may be fulfilling in some ways, but without that visual representation, you'll never reach that eureka moment when the two mediums merge and the mind makes sense of it. That's analogous to the author's problem here.

So I think it's ironic--and unfortunate--that the book makes much of the difference between the textual and the visual, but isn't able to balance the two in a really meaningful way.

Ultimately, I think the crux of the book's problem is that it's a textbook, when it should be an art book. I think the text should supplement the art in this case, rather than the other way around. While I got a lot out of the book, I wish I could have learned a lot more.

[Teemu Öhman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Scott L. Montgomery’s The Moon and the Western Imagination is a fascinating book about how the Moon has been depicted and understood in western art and science from the antiquity to late 1700s. My problem is that I’ve always found religion and philosophy to be terribly boring and useless ways to understand and/or describe the world. Thus, given that nobody depicted the Moon in any sensible or naturalistic way before the 1400s, the first half of the book was quite a struggle for me.

However, when Montgomery gets to Flemish painter Jan van Eyck (~1390–1441), who made the first true image depicting the surface features of the Moon, I really got into the story. The following 120 pages or so was really good stuff. I would have managed without the last bits about Uranus, Neptune, Mars and Mercury, although I can see Montgomery’s point of including them (albeit very briefly).

The Moon and the Western Imagination is not as enjoyable as the brilliant Epic Moon by William Sheehan and Thomas Dobbins and not as informative as Ewen Whitaker’s Mapping and Naming the Moon, but it does complement them nicely by providing a rather different point of view.

The book has a proper reference list and a good index, as it should, and it’s clearly been proofread. The printing quality and the paper are not the greatest, which is why the figures aren’t as good as they could be, but they are usually sufficient so the reader is able to get the point. There could have been more of them, though.

Overall 3.5/5, rounded up to 4/5.

[Marysia]

I had Scott Montgomery as a college professor and he assigned his book. It was interesting and opened a perspective I hadn't really considered before. I found the language in the book overly flowery most of the time, though, which annoyed me.

[Clara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Libro muy interesante sobre varios enfoques de la luna. El libro se divide en dos partes, en la primera se incluyen aspectos de tipo cultural (mitología, literatura...) y en la segunda encontramos aspectos científicos, abordando con detalle los pasos hasta conseguir esas huellas en la luna. No entra en determinar o probar la veracidad del logro. Las fotos en conjunto son fantásticas y la calidad de la edición muy buena. La traducción al español en general es buena, en la otra critica parece ser que una traducción nefasta arruinó la percepción del libro. Yo recomiendo su lectura.

[Paul De Belder · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interessante collectie foto's, vergezeld van soms verschrikkelijk slechte en onnozele teksten. De corrector was blijkbaar op vakantie tijdens de uitgave van dit boek - er zijn nauwelijks pagina's te vinden zonder ergerlijke fouten of idiote vertalingen.