Cosmos

Fifteen billion years of cosmic history are compressed into a single calendar year here, a device Carl Sagan uses to show how briefly humans have existed. The book follows the same ground his companion television series covered: the birth of galaxies and stars, the chemistry of a living cell, the rise of writing and the scientific method. It ends on a question still open: whether intelligent life exists elsewhere.

Sagan's case is that science and civilization grew up together, from the library at Alexandria to the probes now leaving the solar system. Understanding the cosmos, he argues, means understanding what makes a species capable of destroying itself. Chapters on stars, evolution and DNA sit beside chapters on Cold War nuclear stockpiles, treated as one continuous problem.

Each of the thirteen chapters matches an episode of the original Cosmos series, illustrated throughout. None assumes the reader already knows physics or biology. Sagan explains orbital mechanics, the evolutionary tree and the structure of a cell in the same plain, patient voice. He often does it through the working lives of the astronomers and naturalists who worked each idea out long before satellites existed to confirm it.

It asks nothing of the reader beyond curiosity, and it was written for exactly that reader. The book spent more than a year on bestseller lists after its 1980 publication. It won the Hugo Award for Best Non-Fiction Book the following year.