Carl Sagan: A Life

Abstract

This is a quite remarkable book. If you want a quick and sketchy evening's read about your favourite popular scientist then this is not for you! On the other hand, if you want a detailed, fascinating and exhaustively researched story about a very special person, then read it. The author has produced a painstaking picture of Sagan. The main text consists of 430 pages of stories, anecdotes, quotations etc, which lead us through the complex life of a very complex man. This is backed up with a further 70 pages of detailed references followed by a 19 page bibliography. We learn about Sagan from his early days, when he was a somewhat precocious schoolboy, right up to his final days when he was in poor health yet still turning out books at a great rate. Like many people, I knew of him but not very much about him before I read this book. He was a man of giant energy who attempted to combine the life of a working research scientist with that of a great popularizer as well as extending his tentacles into various aspects of (scientific) government policy. Even in his early days his one aim in life seemed to be that of furthering his own career by getting to know as many well-known scientists as possible. He had fingers in many pies - academic, something mysterious and military related, book writing, popular science on TV etc, etc. He was particularly concerned with the space programme, especially the planetary probes and the Voyager vehicles which took messages from Earth to outer space. We get the impression from the book that he was especially obsessed with extraterrestrial life and was desperate to confirm its existence. He was instrumental in keeping the SETI programme going even though it eventually had to go private. We learn that he was not a good family man and work usually took precedence over domestic issues. As a result his private life seems to have been as complicated as his professional life. He was a man whose mind went in several directions at once and he was criticized at times for not following through his ideas. Perhaps he saw himself as the ideas man and preferred to leave the details to somebody else. Sometimes his ideas were wildly wrong, which is, perhaps, not surprising when working at the frontiers of science. One thing that surprised me was a suggestion by the author that his book The Dragons of Eden was `obviously written under the inspiration of marijuana'! It is easy and very tempting to criticize someone like Sagan after reading this book, which catalogues his many faults along with his many strengths. However, very few of us could attempt to accomplish even a tenth of what he accomplished in his lifetime. He had a health problem all through his life but nonetheless overcame all his personal and interpersonal problems to become the man that we all know, someone who made science, and especially astronomy, live for vast numbers of ordinary people. He aroused critical passions in many but, as Keay says, `In my years of research, I met not one person - not one - who knew Sagan closely and who strongly disliked him'. The book is an excellent read and gives a fascinating picture not only of the man but of science politics in the USA at the time.