Turn Right at Orion: Travels Through the Cosmos

The original Rocinante bore Don Quixote in his errant adventures across medieval Spain; its namesake carried John Steinbeck and his poodle across America. Rocinante's latest incarnation is a wondrous spacecraft that, in the understated words of its pilot, "is perhaps not quite so sturdy as I should have liked"--but that nevertheless has transported him across space to the center of the Milky Way.

Structured as something of a picaresque novel, Turn Right at Orion is a textbook in disguise. In its pages, the noted astrophysicist Mitchell Begelman guides readers across 60 million years of time and immense galactic distances, discussing the formation of the Milky Way as a great sooty disk full of graphite, hydrocarbons, and silicon-based minerals, "pollution from supernova explosions, lesser stellar explosions called novae, and the evaporating outer envelopes of giant stars." Along the way, Begelman's narrator offers lessons in the workings of gravity, motion, and time, explaining, for instance, why it is that the Earth does not cave in on itself (it resists gravitational collapse, he notes, because it is made of highly resilient materials), why light bends, and why planets and black holes form. The result is a charming, fluent introduction to basic space science, just right for the novice. --Gregory McNamee