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hagbard_celine's review against another edition
3.0
The second book I've read on the subject, and my reading definitely benefited from even the modest experience offered by first book (Verschuur's "Impact!"). Both are 20 years out of date, though, so who knows what kind of progress has been made in the field since publication? It ain't me.
The Shoemaker-Levy comet impact on Jupiter seems to have inspired a rash of books about comet/asteroid impacts in the mid-90s. I'm still getting my sea legs, so I can't say whether these books are the product of good science sensing a PR opportunity, or less-credible alarmism.
Anyway, this book has a ton of really great historical accounts of impacts. Verschuur's book spent a lot of time preoccupied with the institutional drama around academic impact research (who fucked whom over for credit/grant money/establishment credibility). This book has none of that, and instead spends a lot of time tabulating ancient Chinese impact death tolls, mixed with eyewitness accounts and narratives of computer simulations and hypothetical impacts. Much better.
Also, there's a bit where the author describes evolutionary catastrophism in terms of classical music. The dude seems super into "Madama Butterfly."
The Shoemaker-Levy comet impact on Jupiter seems to have inspired a rash of books about comet/asteroid impacts in the mid-90s. I'm still getting my sea legs, so I can't say whether these books are the product of good science sensing a PR opportunity, or less-credible alarmism.
Anyway, this book has a ton of really great historical accounts of impacts. Verschuur's book spent a lot of time preoccupied with the institutional drama around academic impact research (who fucked whom over for credit/grant money/establishment credibility). This book has none of that, and instead spends a lot of time tabulating ancient Chinese impact death tolls, mixed with eyewitness accounts and narratives of computer simulations and hypothetical impacts. Much better.
Also, there's a bit where the author describes evolutionary catastrophism in terms of classical music. The dude seems super into "Madama Butterfly."
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