MARGARET AND WILLIAM HUGGINS Unravelling Starlight: William and Margaret Huggins and the Rise of the New Astronomy. Barbara J. Becker (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2011). p. xx + 380. £65. ISBN 978-1-107-00229-6.In 1897, as the author of this dense biography reminds us, William Huggins then well in his eighties published his own account of the astronomy that three to four decades earlier he had helped to launch. In later studies about the emergence of astrophysics as a new discipline of astronomy, many seemed to forget that Huggins himself had emphasized this was a retrospect. An intellectual companion of William and Margaret Huggins for the past twenty years, Barbara J. Becker certainly has the required credentials to reassess the value of the astronomer's narrative. By focusing narrowly on Huggins's exceptional career as well as his wife's, Becker has produced a book that strikes me as being both extremely ambitious and perhaps excessively modest.Becker explains her ambition early in her book. To detach herself from conventional perspectives that have relied too much and too uncritically on Huggins's subjective account, Becker turns to the unpublished material. After a life that was both long and full, the astronomer left an impressive but scattered body of papers that Becker over the years has located and carefully examined. The copious correspondence held in various official repositories and a collection of six observatory notebooks now belonging to Wellesley College near Boston have enabled Becker to go far beyond the published record. She aims at showing that far from merely providing an odd assortment of details and anecdotes (p. 3), this material may yield an intimate knowledge of the material culture of early astrophysics. Held to her own expectations, Becker is brilliantly successful. She does show, as she had hoped, that scientific lives are mosaics fashioned out of happenstance and numerous incremental day-to-day decisions rife with clutter and confusion, dead ends and mistakes (p. 3).With this rich source material, Becker identifies many points omitted by Huggins from his own history. She shows how the hesitations that are characteristic of science as it is practised hardly appear in Huggins's recollections. She examines with great precision the circumvolutions of the astronomer's research agenda in relation to changing technologies and social circumstances. Her close study of Huggins's careful work to detect the motion of stars using the spectroscope is worthy of the best studies of the genre. Like other historians before her (e.g., A. J. Meadows in his biography of Huggins's sometime rival in astrophysics, Norman Lockyer), Becker underscores the personal and institutional controversies that plagued the early history of astrophysics in Britain and that were, by and large, left aside by the older Huggins. …