CHASING VENUS The Race to Measure the Heavens

Who’d have thought astronomy could be so adventurous? When an international consortium of astronomers sets out in 1761 to points across the globe to measure the movement of Venus across the face of the sun, its members find themselves in the middle of a naval war between France and Britain, crossing frozen lakes and rivers in Finland and Siberia, and navigating fickle tropical winds in the Indian Ocean, all in an attempt to calculate the size of the solar system. This is the stuff of Indiana Jones, not Edmond Halley, who came up with the idea. So it is disappointing that the narration of this book should be so matter-of-fact. Robin Sachs is solid and easy to listen to. His pronunciation of foreign words and cities is spot-on. But he lacks the enthusiasm the author has for his subject. Sachs reads the material well but makes this a book on science, not the adventure yarn it really is. R.C.G. © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine [Published: SEPTEMBER 2012]