快猫短视频

Percival Lowell by David Strauss, Harvard, 拢30.95, ISBN 0674002911

A GOOD biography keeps two elements in delicate balance: what they did, and
why they did it. David Strauss, a professor of history at Kalamazoo College in
Michigan, has got it exactly right in Percival Lowell. Lowell, whose career
straddled the 19th and 20th centuries, was one of astronomy鈥檚 brightest stars.
Springing from an extremely rich East Coast clan, he was clever, ambitious and
cultured. After the requisite liberal education at Harvard and a few years
successfully playing the stock market with the family money, he spent 11 years
travelling in Japan. He left the running of his Bostonian family鈥檚 cotton
business to his younger brother and the literary laurels to his sister, the poet
Amy Lowell. Four books later he decided, aged 40, to switch fields and 鈥渢ravel鈥�
to Mars.

Lowell turned his back on run-of-the-mill university observatories and built
and paid for his own. Equipped with the fourth largest refracting telescope in
the US, and refreshingly sited in the high western deserts of Arizona, the
observatory was Lowell鈥檚 ticket to the Red Planet and beyond. He focused on some
of the day鈥檚 more sensational puzzles: mapping the Martian 鈥渃anals鈥� and
discussing Martian life as well as hunting for Planet X. Ignoring academic
journals, Lowell went straight to the people with a series of hugely successful
books about his work.

Strauss鈥檚 gripping and erudite biography is a marvellous portrait of this
American aristocrat and maverick of science, and his conflicts and achievements.
They really don鈥檛 make astronomers like that any more.