Pamela Gossin

It's a book about astronomy, but you still gotta get Darwin in the subtitle. Academics love their Darwin. Anyway, this is a good example of a type of book that doesn't interest me a whole lot, if that makes sense. I find discipline-focused literature and science books to just not be my bag, as I'm more interested in broader issues of what it means to do science than I am more focused issues of what it means to do astronomy. This especially comes down when Gossin gets a little too bogged down in the actual astronomy, which as much as I like Herschel, I don't really find very interesting. Still, this is by no means a bad book, and Hardy's frequent use of astronomical imagery and metaphors means that Gossin delivers some good insights into texts like A Pair of Blue Eyes, Far from the Madding Crowd, and especially Two on a Tower (that's the one that's about an astronomer, after all), though I don't always agree with her readings. I should come back to it sometime.… (más)