In Light-Years There’s No Hurry: Cosmic Perspectives on Everyday Life

Poet and journalist van Heemstra (In Search of a Name) brings cosmology down to earth in this delightful take on enlarging one’s perspective. On a hot summer night in 2019, a sleepless and existentially anxious van Heemstra was doomscrolling through her phone when a picture taken by the Hubble Telescope popped into her feed and seized her imagination as “the most beautiful vista I know.” This moment kickstarted her quest to understand what she came to know as “the overview effect,” or the transcendent shift in perspective of astronauts after they’ve looked down at Earth. With a poet’s eye and a scientist’s empirical persistence, van Heemstra interviewed astrophysicists, engineers, and even a theologian who helped her understand “the profound awareness that we live in a, statistically speaking, negligible planet in an unfathomable universe.” Meanwhile, the author’s daily life continued, and she attempted to see interactions with her partner, children, and neighbors from a new vantage point, concluding that space “is not above us. The universe surrounds us, is within us,” and that cosmic vastness can shed light on social divisiveness, because “if we take a step back, we see how amazing it is that we even exist at all to have these disagreements.” The author’s curious, investigative spirit and lyrical prose enchants. Fans of Rebecca Solnit will love this. (June)