The Solar System: Facts and Exploration (Scientific American Sourcebooks)

Gr 5-8-Vogt caps off his stack of reputable books on individual planets and space probes with this general view of the solar system and the history of its exploration. His account is coherent and lively. Relegating most of the lists, dates, and technical data to appendixes, he specifically describes what the fleet of spacecraft sent out in Sputnick's wake have (and have not, as yet) taught us about the sun, planets, asteroids, comets, moons, meteors, and even the Oort Cloud beyond Pluto. He selects riveting details and images and gives hot topics, such as the Shoemaker-Levy comet that ``slammed'' into Jupiter in 1994, expanded treatment in boxed side essays. The full-color photos are clear, though generally smaller and sparser than those in Patricia Lauber's Journey to the Planets (Crown, 1993) or Seymour Simon's Our Solar System (Morrow, 1992); most are, however, carefully labeled as true-or false-color, montages, mosaics, or artists' renderings. And in a unique final note, these and other techniques used to create space photos are defined. Though Vogt's boosterism leads him to make light of the space program's failures, he does at least mention some of them, and effectively communicates the excitement of each spectacular success. Most of the information here may be easily available elsewhere; still, the book makes an economical alternative to the plethora of more narrowly focused titles, and will give any space-science collection a sturdier base.-John Peters, New York Public Library

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