The Fallen Sky: An Intimate History of Shooting Stars

by Cokinos, Christopher

• ISBN13: 9781585428328
• ISBN10: 1585428329
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-08-05
• Publisher: Penguin Group USA

Summary

Weaving natural history, memoir, and in-depth profiles of amateur researchers, rogue scientists, and stargazing dreamers, a prizewinning poet and nature writer takes readers from Antarctica to outer space to tell the epic story of how the study of meteorites became a modern science.

Author Biography

Christopher Cokinos, former president of the Kansas Audubon Council, is an award-winning writer and poet and a professor of English at Utah State University. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, Orion, Science, and Poetry. Cokinos lives in Utah.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 1
Prologue: Dust: A Brief Memoir of Overlooked Things	p. 9
Distances Measured in Various Units	p. 27
The First Asteroid	p. 29
Ellis Hughes's 15-Ton Caper	p. 34
	p. 41
What Breaks Out Entire: The Eliza Kimberly Story	p. 57
Higher Latitudes: In Search of Peary's Meteorites	p. 81
1 Please Bring Your Wu Wei to the Upright and Locked Position	p. 83
2 Thule and the Barb	p. 93
3 The Isthmus and Meteorite Island	p. 105
The Weather of Belief	p. 129
Big Idea	p. 131
Harvey Ninmger Sees the Light	p. 175
Epiphany on Euclid Street	p. 180
Never Done	p. 202
Strongly Spent	p. 225
A Serious Case of the I Wants: Passions of the Dealers	p. 257
Church of the Sky	p. 285
Life Work: The Biology of Meteorites	p. 309
1 The Resurrection of Acraman	p. 311
2 Old Stones That Can Be Deciphered	p. 333
Old Fire on Blue Ice: An Antarctic Journey	p. 349
Above the Clouds, Halfway Down	p. 351
I Crap Through Disco Night at the South Pole	p. 377
Bedlam	p. 386
Massif: An Unmaking	p. 412
Afterword	p. 437
Glossary of Terms	p. 449
Meteorite Chart	p. 453
Notes	p. 455
Acknowledgments, Permissions, and a Narrative Note	p. 495
Index	p. 505
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