Review: Cosmos, by Carl Sagan
by
Stuart Holland
The legacy of this book casts a long and well deserved shadow. I’ve been hearing about it as a seminal work of science communication and educational literature for years. Now that I’ve picked up audiobooks, I finally had the right venue to listen to it.
It’s amazing how well the content of this book holds up, considering it’s from 1980. You would think that a book about current scientific knowledge would seem a bit quaint 44 years later. And you can tell it’s from the past, but at the same time it doesn’t feel dated. It’s remarkable how many of Carl Sagan’s hopes for the future have come to pass.
It’s remarkable that he’s talking about the Voyager 1 and 2 missions at the time and those missions are still going on now. I’m amazed that the cause of the extinction of the dinosaurs is apparently more recent knowledge than I expected - he discusses candidate theories, but we must’ve only confirmed the asteroid some time later. The Cold War is also a constant backdrop in this book, which gives it an interesting place in history.
The audiobook production is also an all star performance: narrated mostly by LeVar Burton, who delivers a stellar reading, with introductions from Ann Druyan (Sagan’s Widow), Seth MacFarlane, and Neil Degrasse Tyson. They really pulled out all the stops on the cast.
Cosmos is a book about science. It’s also a book about humanity. It’s hopeful about our future, but still cautious about the dangers we face as a species, mostly from ourselves. Carl Sagan had a great knack for weaving together the magnificant scale of an entire universe with the equally magnificant scale of a single lifetime. This book has its reputation for a reason. This book has remained relevant for a reason. And I hope we can all make something of the future that Carl would be proud of.
