This collection of short meditations, each accompanied by the author's illustrations, explores various scientific phenomena that contextualize the just-enough space we occupy in a vast, unknowable universe. I learned plenty from this book - for example, that in 1582 the ten days spanning October 5 through October 14 were skipped to bring the new Gregorian calendar close to a "perfect" year - but for the most part Eating the Sun makes the reader reflect, quietly, about the wonders in the world around us; I've pulled my favorite such thoughts into my book notes.
Eating the Sun by Ella Frances Sanders (November 2019)
Longtime readers will recognize Sanders as the author of Lost In Translation, a book I've written about several (hundred) times over the short history of TOA. Eating the Sun has enough similarities, mostly in the way it focuses on the observable aspects of each topic, but Sanders also takes a few opportunities to inject her own perspective into the writing - one example is the note that despite some people being wrong about the Earth being perfectly flat while others were wrong about it being perfectly spherical, the people who see these groups as being equally wrong are perhaps the most wrong of all. This idea isn't necessarily "right" - in fact, you may think it's the most wrong of all - but it's vital because it speaks to the larger perspective of science and progress, and therefore life; we move from understanding to understanding, using one as the foundation for the next, while relying on the sheer wonder of existence to keep us open to the only certainty about life - we were wrong before, and we'll be wrong again.
In a broader sense, what I liked most about this book was the way it highlighted the details of scientific law without losing sight of the underlying theory that powered the work. The drawback of science is the way it always gives us a slightly different answer than we'd expected from the question - having asked why, we learn about what, when, where, and how. The thrill of discovery is an intoxicating experience, and can sometimes distract us from the original purpose, but at the end it all comes back to that first question - why? Eating the Sun is one attempt to tie all the answers back to that first question.
TOA Rating: Three calendars out of four.
