The recap
Carl Sagan's Cosmos is a guided voyage outward through space and backward through time, written to accompany his landmark television series. Each chapter follows a different thread: how an ancient scholar worked out the size of the Earth from shadows and careful reasoning, how stars forge the atoms that make up our bodies, why Venus and Mars turned out so unlike our own planet, and what it might take to hear from another civilization. Sagan moves easily between astronomy, biology, history and philosophy, pausing to tell the stories of thinkers, some celebrated and some forgotten, who pushed knowledge forward, often at real personal cost. Beneath the science runs a larger argument about humility and responsibility: we are a young, fragile species on a small world, capable of extraordinary understanding and equally capable of destroying ourselves. The prose is lyrical without going soft, and the pages are richly illustrated. Some figures have been updated by later research, but the book's sense of wonder and its case for clear, skeptical thinking have not aged.
Why read it
For anyone who has looked at the night sky and wanted a warm, eloquent guide to what is out there and how we came to know it. It is an ideal first science book and a rewarding reread for veterans.
Fun facts
- 01
The book was published in 1980 as a companion to the PBS series, and its 13 chapters line up with the show's 13 episodes.
- 02
Helped along by the TV series, it spent 50 weeks on the Publishers Weekly bestseller list and 70 weeks on the New York Times list, and was at the time the best-selling science book ever published.
- 03
Cosmos won the 1981 Hugo Award for best non-fiction book.
- 04
A 1980 Christian Science Monitor review argued that the book was an even better product than the television series it accompanied.
- 05
A later Ballantine paperback edition adds a foreword by Neil deGrasse Tyson and an introduction by Ann Druyan, Sagan's collaborator and widow.
