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• Author: Carl Sagan

The CARL SAGAN BOOK COLLECTION

Books:

BILLIONS AND BILLIONS

CONTACT

COSMOS

THE DEMON HAUNTED WORLD

DRAGONS OF EDEN

THE PALE BLUE DOT

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Billions & Billions by CARL SAGAN

Product Details

* Paperback: 320 pages

* Publisher: Ballantine Books (May 12, 1998)

* Language: English

* ISBN-10: 0345379187

* ISBN-13: 978-0345379184

* Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches

Product Description

Carl Sagan died last December, and as a result, these essays exude a feeling of interrupted eloquence. The celebrity planetary astronomer possibly had more books to write that could have compared favorably with his Cosmos (1980) or Pale Blue Dot (1994), but disappointingly, this collection does not bloom like those dependable library perennials. Perhaps expectations are overly inflated with a new Sagan exposition in hand--but here, expectations rapidly deflate upon seeing that the contents comprise much reprinted material, such as nonscience articles he and his wife and coauthor, Ann Druyan, wrote for a Sunday newspaper supplement. One Parade piece, advancing their argument in favor of legal abortion, sourly criticizes televangelist Pat Robertson for using his influence to mobilize opposition to the 1990 article, a point that skates over the sway the authors themselves were trying to exert in the abortion controversy by means of their article. In other chapters, the subjects are flat--an explanation of the origin of Sagan's brand-name cliche"billions and billions" --or the subjects are rudimentary. Blemishes apart, this collection offers some worthwhile essays: his account of battling cancer or summaries of the enviro-political issues that he weighed in on, such as ozone depletion and the fossil fuels^-atmospheric warming nexus. However uneven and eclectic, this tome still flashes with Sagan's curiosity, wonder, and humanity concerning the scientific enterprise.

The final book by the late science populist (The Demon-Haunted World, 1996, etc.) shows him in his role as one of the finest exponents of science for the general public. These brief pieces apply scientifc knowledge to the exploration of essential questions about the environment and the world's future in a disarmingly clear and charming manner. Sagan begins by pointing out that the phrase ``billions and billions,'' indelibly associated with him in the popular mind, is in fact a parody of his style invented by Johnny Carson--then he segues into a discussion of large numbers and scientific notation. In similar fashion, he extrapolates from TV sports to an examination of our species's hunter-gatherer origins, and from the fragile ecology of a small aquarium to that of our entire planet. Sagan's concerns always extend beyond a simple examination of whatever scientific principle he begins with; he is always ready to look into the human consequences of the ideas he discusses. Thus, a discussion of how exponential numbers grow evolves into examinations of population growth and the spread of AIDS. Sagan spends some time reconciling the missions of science and religion: Both relate to the ultimate welfare of humanity, and each, he argues, has something to learn from the other. Chapters on moral issues of global importance (such as the degradation of the environment), and reflections on our accomplishments as a species, including the prolonging of human life, the discovery and manipulation of the atom, travel into space, and unprecedented insights into the nature of the universe, attempt to capture an even longer perspective. In the final chapter, written after Sagan's discovery of his fatal cancer, he looks death in the face and declares his willingness to fight it. A poignant afterword by his wife, Ann Druyan, ends the book. Sagan was upbeat to the last, and a true believer in humanity's ability to transcend its worst impulses. This book captures his spirit at its best.

Carl Sagan brilliantly examines the burning questions of our lives, our world, and the universe around us. These luminous, entertaining essays travel both the vastness of the cosmos and the intimacy of the human mind, posing such fascinating questions as how did the universe originate and how will it end, and how can we meld science and compassion to meet the challenges of the coming century? Here, too, is a rare, private glimpse of Sagan's thoughts about love, death, and God as he struggled with fatal disease. Ever forward-looking and vibrant with the sparkle of his unquenchable curiosity, Billions & Billions is a testament to one of the great scientific minds of our day.

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Contact by CARL SAGAN

Product Details

Mass Market Paperback: 448 pages

Publisher: Pocket (July 1, 1997)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0671004107

ISBN-13: 978-0671004101

Product Dimensions: 6.6 x 4.1 x 1.3 inches

Product Description

It is December 1999, the dawn of the millennium, and a team of international scientists is poised for the most fantastic adventure in human history. After years of scanning the galaxy for signs of somebody or something else, this team believes they've found a message from an intelligent source--and they travel deep into space to meet it. Pulitzer Prize winner Carl Sagan injects Contact, his prophetic adventure story, with scientific details that make it utterly believable. It is a Cold War era novel that parlays the nuclear paranoia of the time into exquisitely wrought tension among the various countries involved. Sagan meditates on science, religion, and government--the elements that define society--and looks to their impact on and role in the future. His ability to pack an exciting read with such rich content is an unusual talent that makes Contact a modern sci-fi classic. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Who could be better qualified than the author of the highly successful Cosmos to turn the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence, and humankind's first contact with it, into imaginative reality? This is precisely what Sagan does in this eagerly awaited and, as it turns out, engrossing first novel. The basic plot is very simple. A worldwide system of radio telescopes, in the charge of brilliant astrophysicist Ellie Arroway, picks up a "Message" from outer space. Ellie is instrumental in decoding the message and building the "Machine" for which it gives instructions (despite stiff opposition from religious fundamentalists and those scientists and politicians who fear it may be a Trojan Horse). Then she and fellow members of a small multinational team board the machine, take a startling trip into outer spaceand on their return must convince the scientific community that they are not the perpetrators of a hoax. Sagan's characters, mostly scientists, are credible without being memorable, and he supplies a love interest that is less than compelling. However, his informed and dramatically enacted speculations into the mysteries of the universe, taken to the point where science and religion touch, make his story an exciting intellectual adventure and science fiction of a high order.

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Cosmos by CARL SAGAN

Product Details

Hardcover: 384 pages

Publisher: Random House; Random Hou edition (May 7, 2002)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0375508325

ISBN-13: 978-0375508325

Product Dimensions: 10.1 x 8.2 x 1.1 inches

Shipping Weight: 2.7 pounds

Product Description

Cosmos was the first science TV blockbuster, and Carl Sagan was its (human) star. By the time of Sagan's death in 1996, the series had been seen by half a billion people; Sagan was perhaps the best-known scientist on the planet. Explaining how the series came about, Sagan recalled:

I was positive from my own experience that an enormous global interest exists in the exploration of the planets and in many kindred scientific topics--the origin of life, the Earth, and the Cosmos, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, our connection with the universe. And I was certain that this interest could be excited through that most powerful communications medium, television.

Sagan's own interest and enthusiasm for the universe were so vivid and infectious, his screen presence so engaging, that viewers and readers couldn't help but be caught up in his vision. From stars in their "billions and billions" to the amino acids in the primordial ocean, Sagan communicated a feeling for science as a process of discovery. Inevitably, some of the science in Cosmos has been outdated in the years since 1980--but Sagan's sense of wonder is ageless.

Told with Sagan’s remarkable ability to make scientific ideas both comprehensible and exciting, Cosmos is about science in its broadest human context, how science and civilization grew up together.

The book also explores spacecraft missions of discovery of the nearby planets, the research in the Library of ancient Alexandria, the human brain, Egyptian hieroglyphics, the origin of life, the death of the Sun, the evolution of galaxies and the origins of matter, suns and worlds.

Sagan retraces the fifteen billion years of cos-mic evolution that have transformed matter into life and consciousness, enabling the Cosmos to wonder about itself. He considers the latest findings on life elsewhere and how we might communicate with the beings of other worlds.

Cosmos is the story of our long journey of discovery and the forces and individuals who helped to shape modern science, including Democritus, Hypatia, Kepler, Newton, Huy-gens, Champollion, Lowell and Humason. Sagan looks at our planet from an extra-terrestrial vantage point and sees a blue jewel-like world, inhabited by a lifeform that is just beginning to discover its own unity and to ven-ture into the vast ocean of space.

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The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by CARL SAGAN

Product Details

Paperback: 480 pages

Publisher: Ballantine Books (February 25, 1997)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0345409469

ISBN-13: 978-0345409461

Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.5 x 1 inches

Product Description

How can we make intelligent decisions about our increasingly technology-driven lives if we don't understand the difference between the myths of pseudoscience and the testable hypotheses of science? Pulitzer Prize-winning author and distinguished astronomer Carl Sagan argues that scientific thinking is critical not only to the pursuit of truth but to the very well-being of our democratic institutions.

Casting a wide net through history and culture, Sagan examines and authoritatively debunks such celebrated fallacies of the past as witchcraft, faith healing, demons, and UFOs. And yet, disturbingly, in today's so-called information age, pseudoscience is burgeoning with stories of alien abduction, channeling past lives, and communal hallucinations commanding growing attention and respect. As Sagan demonstrates with lucid eloquence, the siren song of unreason is not just a cultural wrong turn but a dangerous plunge into darkness that threatens our most basic freedoms.

He muses on the current state of scientific thought, which offers him marvelous opportunities to entertain us with his own childhood experiences, the newspaper morgues, UFO stories, and the assorted flotsam and jetsam of pseudoscience. Along the way he debunks alien abduction, faith-healing, and channeling; refutes the arguments that science destroys spirituality, and provides a "baloney detection kit" for thinking through political, social, religious, and other issues.

Eminent Cornell astronomer and bestselling author Sagan debunks the paranormal and the unexplained in a study that will reassure hardcore skeptics but may leave others unsatisfied. To him, purported UFO encounters and alien abductions are products of gullibility, hallucination, misidentification, hoax and therapists' pressure; some alleged encounters, he suggests, may screen memories of sexual abuse. He labels as hoaxes the crop circles, complex pictograms that appear in southern England's wheat and barley fields, and he dismisses as a natural formation the Sphinx-like humanoid face incised on a mesa on Mars, first photographed by a Viking orbiter spacecraft in 1976 and considered by some scientists to be the engineered artifact of an alien civilization. In a passionate plea for scientific literacy, Sagan deftly debunks the myth of Atlantis, Filipino psychic surgeons and mediums such as J.Z. Knight, who claims to be in touch with a 35,000-year-old entity called Ramtha. He also brands as superstition ghosts, angels, fairies, demons, astrology, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster and religious apparitions.

In a chapter entitled "Science and Hope," Sagan (Pale Blue Dot, Random, 1994) writes: "This book is a personal statement, reflecting my lifelong love affair with science." Accordingly, he deplores pseudoscientific thinking and the credulous beliefs that emerge from it. Today, when science is critical for solving the world's problems, many people, instead, trust astrology and New Age spiritualism. Likewise, surveys reveal that a majority of Americans believe that Earth is regularly visited by space aliens. Using basic tools of science?empiricism, rationalism, and experimentation?Sagan debunks these and other common fallacies of pseudoscience. In doing so, he speculates as to how such beliefs arise. Some of his explanations are not entirely convincing (are alien-abduction tales really modern versions of medieval myths?), but he handles them with empathy so as to not demean the intelligence of true believers. The best chapters examine the state of science education and technical literacy in America and suggest an agenda for improving both. The book is overlong, occasionally redundant, and parts have been published elsewhere. Still, Sagan's theme is important, and his popularity might lure some readers from the UFO and occult books cluttering so many library and bookstore shelves.

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The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence by CARL SAGAN

Product Details

Mass Market Paperback: 288 pages

Publisher: Ballantine Books (December 12, 1986)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0345346297

ISBN-13: 978-0345346292

Product Dimensions: 6.9 x 4.2 x 0.9 inches

Product Description

The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence is a Pulitzer prize[1] winning 1977 book by Carl Sagan. In it, he combines the fields of anthropology, evolutionary biology, psychology, and computer science to give a well balanced perspective of how human intelligence evolved.

One of the main issues featured in the book is the search for a quantitative way of measuring intelligence. Sagan shows that the ratio of brainmass/bodymass is an extremely good indicator, with humans having the highest and dolphins second. It does break down, however, at the extremely small end of the scale. Because a certain minimum size is needed to sustain life[citation needed], smaller creatures (ants in particular) place disproportionally high on the list.

Other topics mentioned include the evolution of the brain (with emphasis on the function of the neocortex in humans), the evolutionary purpose of sleep and dreams, demonstration of sign language abilities by chimps and the purpose of mankind's innate fears and myths. The title "The Dragons of Eden" refers to man's early struggle for survival in the face of predators, and how fear of reptiles may have led to cultural beliefs and myths about dragons and snakes.

Contents

* Introduction

* The Cosmic Calendar

* Genes and Brains

* The Brain and the Chariot

* Eden as a Metaphor: The Evolution of Man

* The Abstractions of Beasts

* Tales of Dim Eden

* Lovers and Madmen

* The Future Evolution of the Brain

* Knowledge is Our Destiny:Terrestrial and Extraterrestrial Intelligence

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Pale Blue Dot by CARL SAGAN

Product Details

Paperback: 384 pages

Publisher: Ballantine Books; Ballantine Books Ed edition (September 8, 1997)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0345376595

ISBN-13: 978-0345376596

Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 0.9 inches

Product Description

In a tour of our solar system, galaxy and beyond, Cornell astronomer Sagan meshes a history of astronomical discovery, a cogent brief for space exploration and an overview of life-from its origins in the oceans to humanity's first emergence to a projected future where humans "terraform" and settle other planets and asteroids, Earth having long been swallowed by the sun. Maintaining that such relocation is inevitable, the author further argues that planetary science is of practical utility, fostering an interdisciplinary approach to looming environmental catastrophes such as "nuclear winter" (lethal cooling of Earth after a nuclear war, a widely accepted prediction first calculated by Sagan in 1982). His exploration of our place in the universe is illustrated with photographs, relief maps and paintings, including high-resolution images made by Voyager 1 and 2, as well as photos taken by the Galileo spacecraft, the Hubble Space Telescope and satellites orbiting Earth, which show our planet as a pale blue dot. A worthy sequel to Sagan's Cosmos.

Sagan's great appeal as a popular-science writer, beyond his prodigious knowledge, is his optimism and sense of wonder. A visualizer and a visionary, he fires our imagination and turns science into high drama. After writing about our origins in Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1992), Sagan turns his attention to outer space and takes up where Cosmos left off 14 years ago. An astonishing amount of information was amassed during that productive era, and Sagan, of course, is up on all of it. A passionate and eloquent advocate of space exploration, he believes that the urge to wander, and the need for a frontier, is intrinsic to our nature, and that this trait is linked to our survival as a species. Throughout this beautifully illustrated, revelatory, and compelling volume, Sagan returns again and again to our need for journeys and quests as well as our unending curiosity about our place in the universe. Such philosophical musings are interwoven with precise and enthusiastic accounts of the triumphs of interplanetary exploration, from the Apollo moon landings to the spectacular findings of robotic missions, especially the Voyager spacecraft. Sagan describes one exciting discovery after another regarding the four giants--Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune--and their many moons, mysterious and exquisite rings, and volatile atmospheres. He argues, convincingly, that planetary exploration is of immense value. It not only teaches us about our celestial neighbors, but helps us understand and protect Earth. Yes, we have seemingly insurmountable problems on this pale blue dot, but we have always reached for the stars, and we mustn't stop now.

This logical successor to Cosmos (1980) offers the characteristic Sagan blueprint for humankind's long-term vitality. In 1990, while speeding out of the solar system, the Voyager 1 spacecraft snapped photographs of the planets. From a distance of 3.7 billion miles, the Earth appears as a ``pale blue dot''--a metaphor Sagan (Astronomy and Space Sciences/Cornell Univ.) employs to underscore the utter insignificance of our home world in relation to the great expanse of space. In his usual eloquent and impassioned language, he builds a cogent argument that our species must venture into this vast realm and establish a space-faring civilization. Fully acknowledging the exorbitant costs that are involved in manned spaceflight while we concurrently face pressing social, economic, and environmental problems at home, Sagan asserts that our very survival depends on colonizing outer space. Astronomers have already identified dozens of potential Armageddons in the form of asteroids that will someday smash into Earth. Undoubtedly, many more remain undetected. The only way to avert inevitable catastrophe, Sagan argues, is for nations to join together and establish a permanent human presence in space. Ultimately, he predicts, humans will conquer space because, like the planets that roam the sky (``planet'' means ``wanderer'' in Greek), we too are wanderers. Deep within us lies a spark that compels us to explore, and space provides the new frontier. The exploration of space will inspire the world's young people and unify quarreling nations. Technology has brought humanity to its moment of truth: Our species has the capability either to annihilate itself or to avoid extinction by journeying to other worlds. The preferable choice is obvious to Sagan. The book lacks even the semblance of a specific plan for achieving a space-faring civilization. Nevertheless, Sagan will once again dazzle readers with his brilliance and breadth of vision.

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