Starborn: How the Stars Made Us (and Who We Would Be Without Them)

Trotta (The Edge of the Sky), a physics professor at the International School for Advanced Study in Italy, offers a stellar survey of the “remarkable but often unrecognized” role played by stars and other cosmic bodies in human history. Covering the sky’s importance to timekeeping and navigation, Trotta notes that Egyptians as far back as the 13th century BCE divided the day into 12 hours on primitive sundials and that Polynesian mariners followed the stars to explore and settle “almost all habitable Pacific islands” between 2000 BCE and 1100 CE. Astronomy served as “the midwife to all Earth’s sciences,” Trotta contends, discussing how Galileo’s and Nicolaus Copernicus’s studies of the night sky contributed to the development of a scientific method “focused on regularities, measurement, and prediction.” The prose is evocative (“The artifacts and scant remains that do exist... cannot tell us of a hand raised to shield one’s eyes against the glare of the setting Sun, looking for the first slice of the crescent Moon”), and the history fascinates, even if the earliest material is largely reliant on speculation (Trotta suggests women may have kept the first lunar calendars to track their fertility and menstrual cycles). Still, it’s a stimulating take on how the heavens have shaped life on Earth. (Nov.)