Nothing in This Book Is True, But It's Exactly How Things Are
by Bob Frissell
from Frog Books
This ambitious book is a personal psycho-spiritual journey, a theorization on the meaning of the monuments of Mars, a guidebook for transcending present three-dimensional limitations, and an account of our function within the grand celestial battle between internal and external knowledge. The newly revised and expanded edition of this cult classic features photos and illustrations throughout, and adds the Lucifer Rebellion, the solar storm, and the final three breaths of the merkaba meditation. The author emphasizes the importance of meditation for promoting the understanding of and connection to the metaphysical.
The Monuments of Mars: A City on the Edge of Forever (5th Edition)
by Richard C. Hoagland
from Frog Books
For many years Richard Hoagland alone hypothesized that sentient beings spent time on Mars millions of years ago assembling behemoth structures whose ruins are still seen today. Here Hoagland redefines the solar system as a different place than NASA has presented. The book includes a new preface covering the Mars Global Surveyor photos and reactions of NASA.
The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must
by Robert Zubrin
from Free Press
"For our generation and many that will follow, Mars is the New World," writes Zubrin. This book went to press serendipitously, just as NASA was making its startling if heavily-qualified announcement that simple life may have once existed on the fourth rock from the sun. Zubrin doesn't spend an enormous amount of time arguing why Mars exploration is desirable -- we all want astronauts to go there, don't we? -- but rather devotes the bulk of this book explaining how it can happen on a sensible, bare-bones budget of $20-30 billion and a "travel light and live off the land" philosophy.
Since the beginning of human history Mars has been an alluring dream—the stuff of legends, gods, and mystery. The planet most like ours, it has still been thought impossible to reach, let alone explore and inhabit.
Now with the advent of a revolutionary new plan, all this has changed. Leading space exploration authority Robert Zubrin has crafted a daring new blueprint, Mars Direct, presented here with illustrations, photographs, and engaging anecdotes.
The Case for Mars is not a vision for the far future or one that will cost us impossible billions. It explains step-by-step how we can use present-day technology to send humans to Mars within ten years; actually produce fuel and oxygen on the planet's surface with Martian natural resources; how we can build bases and settlements; and how we can one day "terraform" Mars—a process that can alter the atmosphere of planets and pave the way for sustainable life.
Entering Space: Creating a Spacefaring Civilization
by Robert Zubrin
from Tarcher
Humans are not native to the Earth. So posits astronautical engineer Bob Zubrin in the opening of Entering Space. We're native to just a small sliver of it, the spot where our species originated in tropical Kenya. We set out from that paradise about 50,000 years ago, north into "the teeth of the Ice Age," and all the ground we've gained since then has been thanks to our tenacity and our tools.
Zubrin reasons that it's time we cover a little more ground. Written with a boyish enthusiasm and formidable techie know-how, Entering Space urges us to realize "the feasibility, the necessity, and the promise" of becoming a space-faring civilization, of colonizing our own solar system and beyond. And Zubrin, author of the influential and widely acclaimed The Case for Mars, knows his stuff--NASA adapted his plans for near-term human exploration of Mars, and Carl Sagan gave the author no less credit: "Bob Zubrin really, nearly alone, changed our thinking on this issue." Entering Space plots the second and third phases of humanity's course--now that we've mastered our own planet, Zubrin says we must first look to settling our solar system (beginning with Mars) and then to the galaxy beyond.
With its practicable visions of using "iceteroids" to terraform Mars and harnessing the power of the outlying gas giants ("the solar system's Persian Gulf"), Entering Space succeeds at making the fantastic seem attainable, the stuff of science fiction, science fact. --Paul Hughes
The man celebrated as "the Christopher Columbus of Mars" brings us to the very brink of human exploration.
Using nuts-and-bolts engineering and a unique grasp of human history, Robert Zubrin takes us to the not-very-distant future, when our global society will branch out into the universe. From the current-day prospect of lunar bases and Mars settlements to the outer reaches of other galaxies, Zubrin delivers the most important and forward-looking work on space and the true possibilities of human exploration since Carl Sagan's Cosmos.
Sagan himself said of Zubrin's humans-to-Mars plan, "Bob Zubrin really, nearly alone, changed our thinking on this issue." With Entering Space, he takes us further, into the prospect of human expansion to the outer planets of our own solar system--and beyond.
"An exhilarating and informative ride." --The San Diego Union-Tribune
"Robert Zubrin is a true engineering genius like the heroic engineers of the past." --Frederick Turner, American Enterprise
Roving Mars: Spirit, Opportunity, and the Exploration of the Red Planet
by Steve Squyres
from Hyperion
teve Squyres is the face and voice of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover mission. Squyres dreamed up the mission in 1987, saw it through from conception in 1995 to a successful landing in 2004, and serves as the principal scientist of its $400 million payload. He has gained a rare inside look at what it took for rovers Spirit and Opportunity to land on the red planet in January 2004-and knows firsthand their findings.
The Cydonia Codex: Reflections from Mars
by George J. Haas
from Frog Books
In what can only be described as one of the most important archaeological and sociological discoveries in human history, The Cydonia Codex offers overwhelming evidence of aesthetic and symbolic design on the surface of the planet Mars. The authors' research encompasses over ten years of study and analysis of NASA photographs of the "Face on Mars" and its surrounding complex. Beginning with the famous 1976 photograph of a mile-long formation found on the surface of Mars that strongly resembles a human face, Haas and Saunders offer side-by-side comparisons of the art and sculpture of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica with a set of corresponding geoglyphic structures found in the Cydonia region of Mars. The implication is staggering--Earth's history and humankind's origins could be very different than commonly believed. Includes black and white photos throughout, as well as illustrations.
An Anthropologist On Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales
by Oliver Sacks
from Knopf
The works of neurologist Oliver Sacks have a special place in the swarm of mind-brain studies. He has done as much as anyone to make nonspecialists aware of how much diversity gets lumped under the heading of "the human mind."
The stories in An Anthropologist on Mars are medical case reports not unlike the classic tales of Berton Roueché in The Medical Detectives. Sacks's stories are of "differently brained" people, and they have the intrinsic human interest that spurred his book Awakenings to be re-created as a Robin Williams movie.
The title story in Anthropologist is that of autistic Temple Grandin, whose own book Thinking in Pictures gives her version of how she feels--as unlike other humans as a cow or a Martian. The other minds Sacks describes are equally remarkable: a surgeon with Tourette's syndrome, a painter who loses color vision, a blind man given the ambiguous gift of sight, artists with memories that overwhelm "real life," the autistic artist Stephen Wiltshire, and a man with memory damage for whom it is always 1968.
Oliver Sacks is the Carl Sagan or Stephen Jay Gould of his field; his books are true classics of medical writing, of the breadth of human mentality, and of the inner lives of the disabled. --Mary Ellen Curtin
Detailed and fascinating portraits of seven neurological patients, including a surgeon consumed by the compulsive tics of Tourette's syndrome unless he is operating; an artist who loses all sense of color in a car accident, but finds a new sensibility and creative power in black and white; and an autistic professor who cannot decipher the simplest social exchange between humans, but has built a career out of her intuitive understanding of animal behavior.
"Among doctors who write with acuity and grace, Sacks ( The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat) takes a higher place with each successive book.... enlarges our view of the nature of human experience." --Publisher's Weekly
"... Dr. Sacks's best book to date." --The New York Time Book Review
Conservatives Are from Mars, Liberals Are from San Francisco: 101 Reasons I'm Happy I Left the Left
by Burt Prelutsky
from WND Books
"For years," Burt Prelutsky says, "the ranks of the Right were so bereft of amusing people they had to point to William F. Buckley Jr. as their token funnyman. Finally, thank God, P. J. O'Rourke came along. Now he was really funny. I mean, on purpose."
So begins the man who invented political incorrectness. In this delightful social commentary and on just about everything the Left does that offends him, he brings a biting wit.
- On politicians: "If you have a politician for a friend, you don't need an enemy."
- On lawyers: "How is it than in a society in which everything from toys to toasters comes with dire warnings attached, lawyers don't?"
- On working people: "While liberals sing folk songs celebrating the wonderful folk who build the bridges, till the soil, and make the world run, they just don't want them to vote."
In 101 short, pithy chapters Prelutsky applies his wit and wisdom to the big issues of the day. To quote him: "So rightwingers, dig in and enjoy. Liberals, dig in and wise up."
A Traveler's Guide to Mars
by William K. Hartmann
from Workman Publishing Company
A Traveler's Guide to Mars revitalizes the Red Planet, leaving readers with the urge to don a spacesuit and take a long trip. With the look and heft of a guide to someplace you might actually go, the book presents Mars as a place of canyons and volcanoes, mesas, and barren plains, not that dissimilar from parts of Earth. Author William K. Hartmann, who participated in the Mars Global Surveyor mission, uses all the photos and data collected by scientists in decades of research to give a thorough, yet not boring, overview of the planet. The most exciting stuff is about water--whether it ever flowed on Mars, where it went, why it's hard to find. Beyond that, there are the rocks, dust, and weather to talk about, and Mars has lots of all three. Sidebars, maps, and chronologies help keep the regions and geology of Mars organized. Hartmann never forgets he's writing for the lay reader, and his style is personable and clear. When answering claims of NASA cover-ups, ancient civilizations, and hidden structures on Mars, he calmly lays out the facts and pictures, urging readers to simply examine the evidence. Hartmann offers a tourist's-eye view of one of our most intriguing planetary neighbors and does more to polish NASA's tarnished image than a thousand press releases. --Therese Littleton
In this extraordinary Baedeker—accessible, up-to-date, and prodigiously illustrated with photographs from Mariner 9, Viking, Pathfinder, the Hubble Space Telescope, and the ongoing mars Global Surveyor spacecraft—visitors will encounter:
- Olympus Mons, the largest volcano in the solar system, rising three times as high as Mount Everest and covering an area the size of Missouri
- Tharsis Planitia, the "high plains of Mars," with plains rising 29,000 feet—wide enough to cover Europe.
- Valles Marineris, an equatorial canyon so vast that America's Grand Canyon would be a mere tributary.
Plus: the "face" on Mars, the White Rock, the "Canals" of Xanthe—and the first possible evidence of an ancient Martian life-form.
Two events will make the summer of 2003 a remarkable one for amateur astronomers. By late August, Mars will come within 34 million miles of Earth, appearing six times larger and shining 85 times brighter than usual--the most striking and spectacular Mars apparition in tens of thousands of years (The New York Times). And William K. Hartmann, co-author of The Grand Tour, Out of the Cradle, and The History of Earth, is publishing A TRAVELER'S GUIDE TO MARS.
Conceived and created like a real Baedecker-factual, accessible, heavily illustrated, in a carry-around size--A TRAVELER'S GUIDE TO MARS brings together all the astonishing information scientists have recently learned about Mars, and conveys it in the engaging, lively style that made Dr. Hartmann the first-ever winner of the Carl Sagan Medal for public communication of planetary science. Taken around the planet like tourists, readers will discover mysterious dry riverbeds, the largest volcano in the solar system (three times higher than Mount Everest), a possible ancient sea floor, giant impact craters, the face on Mars, and other wonders.
Throughout is an Extraordinary selection of photographs, maps, and paintings, including images from Mariner 9 and the Viking explorations, the Hubble Space Telescope, and the ongoing Mars Global Surveyor mission. Four gatefolds show the latest topographic maps of the entire Martian surface. Sidebars advise readers on what to wear and landing procedures. In addition, Hartmann's My Martian Chronicles spotlight his life and times as a planetary scientist.
Postcards from Mars: The First Photographer on the Red Planet
by Jim Bell
from Dutton Adult
The first photographic tour of the surface of another planet has now been accomplished. Those who thrilled to the lunar beauty of Full Moon and the IMAX smash Roving Mars will marvel at this awesome, vivid, beautiful portrait of what it is like to take a stroll on Mars.
The most fantastic of all journeys—the Spirit and Opportunity mobile robot missions to the surface of Mars—produced over 150,000 astonishing photographs. While the images were made available on low-resolution computer screens as they were sent back across millions of space miles, no one until now has done the painstaking work of editing, cropping, and processing these massive (often larger than 100 megabytes) images.
The person to do it is Jim Bell, the scientist and photographer who led the photography team on this historic expedition. With his unique perspective, these photographs take us from the brave launches of these robots, to the alien landscape they discovered and the mysteries of the planet that they have helped to solve.
Over 150 lavish full-color-process prints bring the colors and textures of Mars to vivid life on the page. Four of the most impressive pictures are presented in their entirety as gatefold images— which extend over three feet in width—providing a view of the surface of another planet unprecedented in its detail and clarity. Postcards from Mars is the perfect gift to give readers who have their feet on the ground and their eyes on the heavens.
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