Booksology The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America by David Baron
It started out innocently enough. In the summer of 1892, Earth was making its closest approach to Mars in 15 years, causing excitement not only among astronomy buffs but the general public. To the naked eye, the fourth planet from the sun shone brighter than all the stars in the night sky. Through telescopes, ever improving technologically, Mars’s surface revealed itself to have exotic stretches of desolate, red-ocher terrain and more familiar-looking polar ice caps. Joseph Pulitzer, having recently purchased and turbo-yellow-ized the New York World, hyped these developments in his paper with such headlines as VISIT MARS! and MARS AND ITS MEN.
In his entertaining new book, The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America, David Baron, a former NPR science correspondent, brings to life the “Mars boom” that resulted from this confluence of factors. It’s a lively story that will be entirely new to most modern readers, though, like many a chapter in this country’s history, it’s a typically American tale of industriousness and can-do spirit that ultimately runs aground on flimflam, bunkum, bosh, and hooey.
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