76 Scientific American, October 2019RECOMMENDED
By Andrea GawrylewskiIn this stargazer’s guide (with a glow-in-the-dark cover), astrophysicist Barker gives tips for finding celestial phenomena with or without a telescope.
She shares practical tips and tricks to navigate the boundless sky, such as how to identify the constellation Orion, spot the red supergiant star Betel-
geuse and even locate the Apollo 11 moon landing site. The amusing illustrations and maps come in handy to identify the right time and place for ob-
serving. Although only 50 sights are highlighted, there is much more to explore out there. As Barker writes, “the sky isn’t the limit—the sky has no limit.”
— Sunya BhuttaNASA, ESA AND J.HESTERArizona State UniversityRepublic of Numbers: Unexpected
Stories of Mathematical Americans
through History
by David Lindsay Roberts.
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019 ($29.95)The U.S. was once a back-
water for mathematical re-
search, but over the past 200
years it has become a power-
house, writes math professor
Roberts. He explores this transition through sto-
ries of lesser-known thinkers, such as Catharine
Beecher, who founded schools for women and
wrote arithmetic textbooks, and famous ones
such as John Nash. Perhaps most unexpected is
a chapter on Abraham Lincoln, who gained math
experience surveying land and studying geome-
try. Roberts calls into question Lincoln’s heroic
status, describing the surveying’s role in forcing
Native Americans off their land. Later chapters
offer a similar dose of honesty, entwining mathe-
matics with social realities. — Leila SlomanThe Trouble with Gravity:
Solving the Mystery beneath Our Feet
by Richard Panek.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019 ($28)The reason rain falls down,
not up, and why balls inevita-
bly reach the ground: gravity.
This most familiar force seems
simple—even babies get the
concept. Yet gravity is fundamentally a mystery,
writer Panek reveals in this beautiful and philo-
sophical investigation of nature’s weak est force.
He surveys creation myths for a cultural under-
standing of gravity, interviews physicists about
why the multiverse might explain gravity’s
strangeness and even meditates on the force
of gravity pulling the waves off Italy’s Amalfi
Coast. Readers will not emerge from this book
with the answer to the question “What is gravi-
ty?”—a so far unanswerable quandary—but
they will gain many and varied insights from
the asking. — Clara MoskowitzThe Bastard Brigade: The True Story
of the Renegade Scientists and Spies
Who Sabotaged the Nazi Atomic Bomb
by Sam Kean. Little, Brown, 2019 ($30)
As World War II enveloped
Europe and the Pacific, a bat-
tle was playing out between
a group of Nazi physicists
dubbed the Uranium Club
and the Alsos Mission, a clandestine faction of
the Manhattan Project. Writer Kean breaks down
the sabotage efforts of Alsos members such as
baseball-player-turned-spy Moe Berg, as well as
others who got drawn in, including Joseph Ken-
nedy, Jr., and Nobel Prize–winning chemist Irène
Joliot-Curie. Together they prevented the Nazis
from developing nuclear weapons. Kean traces
the scientific discoveries that led to the creation
of the bomb and includes illustrations that take
on challenging concepts. The world might be
vastly different had Germany harnessed nuclear
weapons first. — Jennifer Leman50 Things
to See in
the Sky
by Sarah Barker.
Princeton Architectural
Press, 2019 ($16.95)SWAN NEBULA, or M17, about 5,500 light-years from
Earth, is visible just above the constellation Sagittarius.