Darkness and light
It was a nice idea: to take the night from the vantage point of the equinox and explore what was happening hour by hour, chapter by chapter, between 6 pm and 6 am. So all aboard the search engine for a cruise. We go through the origins of light and dark, some bits of mythology, the biology of nocturnal animals, the role of sleep in different metabolisms, variations in human chemistry during the night, parties, nightclubs, sex and dreams, and some colourful autobiography. There is a ramble up every passing tangent, illuminated by sunsets, starlight and dawns, and adorned with quotations from a rich multiplicity of sources.
This should be a bedside book, but the reader will often be tempted to wander outside to look at the stars, or watch the patterns of human-made light from the bedroom window. The author well brings out how those pools of light from cities which can be seen from an aircraft window over the dark half of the earth are something new in planetary history. They show how we are using up the accumulated stores of fossil energy laid down over millions of years. Our successors, like our predecessors, may know a much darker world. Already darkness sometimes comes as a relief, and not only for astronomers.
There are some good stories in this book. I like that, perhaps apocryphal, from Augustus Hare in Victorian times about sleepwalkers. A lady woke to become aware that someone was in her room. She felt hands moving to and fro over her bed. She became so frightened that she fainted. When she woke in the morning, she found that the intruder had been the butler who had laid the table for fourteen upon her bed. Then there are stories of insomnia, nightmares, ghostly visitors, and things that go bump in the night. I like a quotation from James Boswell. "In sleep the doors of the mind are shut, and thoughts keep jumping in at the windows. They tumble headlong, and therefore are so disorderly and strange."
If there is much to inform and entertain in this book, it is not as good as it could have been. There is clumsy as well as eloquent writing, mis-spellings of foreign words, and the science and history should have been checked. It was Fred Hoyle, not George Gamow, who coined the phrase "the big bang"; we use the Gregorian not the Julian calendar; and the French revolution was against Louis XVI not Louis XV. For British readers an enjoyable howler is a reference to a nightingale which sang in "Barclay" Square. If there is a new edition, editors will have work to do. In the meantime enjoy this book, and endure the occasional wince.
