'The Planets,' by Dava Sobel
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The author "has aimed 'The Planets' squarely at a mass
audience receptive to the romance of the heavens, ready to
have its mind boggled by weird and wonderful facts, and eager
to coo and trill over verbal baby pictures of peppy little
Mercury and seductive Venus," writes William Grimes.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/19/books/19...html?8bu&emc=bu

I've read this and have a couple of comments.

Quick summary. It's poorer than Gallileo's Daughter and a lot poorer than Longitude.
If you are looking for hard facts, or even a well balanced light read giving an insight into "The Planets" then this isn't for you.
If you are someone who can't understand the continuing popularity of Astrology then this isn't for you.
If you like books that are internally coherent, or at least stylistically consistent then this isn't for you.

To be fair Ms Sobel does convey some of the wonder in an effective way (at times) but it's hard for that to compensate for the jarring changes in narrative style from chapter to chapter. The Martian chapter (where she changes to first person narrative taking on the identity of the Allen Hills 84001 Meteorite) was awful.

Obviously from this review there are some folks will like it but I found it painful.

My advice is to give it a miss.

Dava Sobel, she of the bestselling Longitude and Galileo’s Daughter, tells in The Planets the true story of her friend Carolyn, who fell in love with an analyst of moon rocks at a university laboratory. The fellow was truly smitten, since he risked his job to give Carolyn a smidgen of moon dust in token of his adoration. Literally, he gave her the moon.

In terms of value, it’s worth remembering that a single carat of moon rock went at auction in 1993 for $500,000. On hearing of this exorbitant gift, Sobel demanded a privileged view of the stuff, whereupon Carolyn answered sheepishly, “I ate it,” adding, “There was so little.”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2102-1747357,00.html

I learned of this review and this event in lunar "history" courtesy of Tom Brosz on the HabitableZone Space forum.

I haven't read the book yet myself but I saw Dava Sobel do a reading at Caltech and she read that part about the moon dust. No, this book is not about hard science facts, it's about bridging the gap between her generally well educated readers and the heavens above them. In interviews she explains that she wrote the book for her editor (publisher? agent?), a well-educated and intelligent guy who once asked her the question "What's the difference between the solar system, the galaxy, and the universe?" "It was all a fog to him," she said. The book isn't really meant for us, it's meant for the people we went to college with who followed other paths and can't quite understand our fascination with space.

When she's interviewed or is giving a reading Dava also talks a lot about the risk of including astrology in this book, but she points out that nearly every person knows what their astrological sign is; and that most people 'know' more about astrology than they do about astronomy; and that all of the grandfathers of astronomy whom we revere (Galileo, Kepler, etc) were trained as astrologers and cast horoscopes for kings and potentates. Astrology is a 'hook' for her to draw people in with. She told a very funny story during the reading about visiting an astrologer and having horoscopes cast for both Galileo, the scientist, and Galileo, the spacecraft, and there being something in there about Galileo, the spacecraft, having difficulty communicating...it's all in the way she tells it. I'm a big fan of Dava, she's a lovely person.

--Emily

A Play Inspired by Dava Sobel's Galileo and His Daughter

Copyright © 2001-06 by David S. F. Portree.

Author note:

In November 2001, inspired by Dava Sobel's wonderful book Galileo's
Daughter, I wrote the following short play for Lowell Observatory's annual
Voices from the Past program. Over several weekends I played Galileo Galilei,
and a talented young woman named Amy Smith played Suor Maria Celeste.

In March 2002, at the invitation of a visitor who had seen one of our
performances, we presented the play at a teacher's convention in Las Vegas,
Nevada. We had great fun wandering the Venetian casino in our costumes. My
Galileo adventures led Martha and I to give our daughter Samantha the lovely
middle name "Celeste."

There followed a curious denouement: a friend on the Galileo Jupiter orbiter
science team gave Sobel a copy of my script, inspiring her to write her own
play. Inspiration came full circle. Sobel's play, longer than mine and based
more closely on her book, was performed on September 22, 2003, in Pasadena,
California, as an end-of-mission tribute to the Galileo mission's engineers
and scientists.

The play and photos here:

http://members.aol.com/dsfportree/galileo.htm

A fascinating Web site about one of the first and certainly among the
most famous of the lunar and planetary observers and recorders:

http://www.pacifier.com/~tpope/index.htm

This site includes extensive images and details about what Galileo saw
when he aimed his telescopes at the Moon and other nearby worlds.

As just one prime example:

http://www.pacifier.com/~tpope/Moon_Page.htm