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December 23rd, 2024
Book Review: Lunar: A History of the Moon in Myths, Maps, and Matter, Edited by Matthew Shindell; The University of Chicago Press; Hardcover/Cloth, 256 pages; $65.00.
This is a unique, beautiful, inspiring, and vital volume – a book to help the reader prepare for humankind’s reintroduction to on-location Moon exploration. As noted author Dava Sobel writes in her foreword, you will be consumed by how the Moon is portrayed here, “a black-and-white world rendered in a riot of gorgeous colours.”
Central to the book are superb cartographical charts of the Moon, coupled with masterful text that highlights our celestial neighbor’s role in popular myth, culture and science.
Between 1962 and 1974, US Geological Survey illustrator-cartographers painstakingly and systematically mapped the Moon, laying out a visual welcome mat for early, pioneering robotic craft and then followed by human explorers.
National Air and Space Museum curator Matthew Shindell has pulled together an impressive, fabulous volume, touching on the significance of the Moon from the Stone Age to today. The book contains well-written contributions from scholars that cover a wide array of over 30 topics, such as: “The Moon in Ancient Egyptian Creation Myths,” “Understanding the Phases of the Moon,” to “‘Moonstruck’ – Lunacy and the Full Moon” and “The Feminine Symbolism of the Moon,” as well as “The Moon in Silent Cinema, and “‘Selling’ the Moon in the 1950s.”
In Shindell’s introduction, he writes that the book demonstrates that “the Moon has been and remains connected to almost every facet of human life. While it is impossible to predict precisely what is to come in the long relationship between humans and the Moon, what is clear is that the Moon will forever live in the human heart.”
There are 500 color plates within the pages of this large format — 10-1/2 x 14-3/8 – book that includes a set of endnotes, a glossary, sources of illustrations and a further reading list.
Again, this is a treasure of a book and the reader will find this volume a prized resource as humanity returns to and “reboots” the Moon!
For more information on this book, go to:
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/L/bo240063025.html
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