BOOK REVIEW

by Yves Barbero

COSMIC CATASTROPHES
by Clark R. Chapman and David Morrison
302 pp., including a glossary and index.
(Plenum $22.95)

Finally, a truly useful summary concerning celestial events
for those of us who have little or no math and even less
formal scientific training. And in well written English to
boot.

For years, I've been catching a newspaper article here and a
longer magazine piece there. Occasionally, they were
excellent expositions but more often than not, they were
written by a bored reporter or a scholar with an ax to grind
or in a language only he and a dozen or so peers could
understand.

What was needed is finally provided by the Chapman/Morrison
book. Cosmic Catastrophes covers all the bases, impacts
from space, the death of dinosaurs, nuclear winter, the new
science [sic] of chaos, the origin of the moon, colliding
worlds, comets, craters, climates, the greenhouse effect,
ozone layers, supernovas (a particular delight was reading
what the 1987 supernova in the Southern Hemisphere meant
insofar as scientific theories were concerned) and the death
of the Sun.

The book also provides an excellent thumb-nail history of the
uniformitarianism verses catastrophism debate over the past
few hundred years, something few lay readers get an insight
of except those of us strange enough to regularly read
Stephen Jay Gould in Natural History magazine.

Yes, they do cover "scientific" creationist claims in
some detail and our old friend, Immanuel Velikovsky, is
analyzed as an example of "catastrophism gone wild."
The book even covers other fringe catastrophism notions,
including one very popular at the time of Nazi Germany when
academic ("Jewish") science was rejected. Fringe science is
not always just merely silly. It's sometimes dangerous.

The book is thorough, provides an useful glossary, is written
for the intelligent layman, seems biased for ecological
concerns (atmospheric warming is well covered), insists on
the scientific approach and even names names. It's an ideal
book to give to a bright kid or a discerning adult.  I can
find little to fault it except that I would have liked to see
it longer.