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Seven years before Richard Preston wrote about horrifying viruses in The Hot Zone, he turned his attention to the cosmos. In First Light, he demonstrates his gift for creating an exciting and absorbing narrative around a complex scientific subject—in this case the efforts by astronomers at the Palomar Observatory in the San Gabriel Mountains of California to peer to the farthest edges of space through the Hale Telescope, attempting to solve the riddle of the creation of the universe. Richard Preston's name became a household word with The Hot Zone, which sold nearly 800,000 copies in hardcover, was on The New York Times's bestseller list for 42 weeks, and was the subject of countless magazine and newspaper articles. Preston has become a sought-after commentator on popular science subjects.
Seven years before Richard Preston wrote about horrifying viruses in The Hot Zone, he turned his attention to the cosmos. In First Light, he demonstrates his gift for creating an exciting and absorbing narrative around a complex scientific subject—in this case the efforts by astronomers at the Palomar Observatory in the San Gabriel Mountains of California to peer to the farthest edges of space through the Hale Telescope, attempting to solve the riddle of the creation of the universe. Richard Preston's name became a household word with The Hot Zone, which sold nearly 800,000 copies in hardcover, was on The New York Times's bestseller list for 42 weeks, and was the subject of countless magazine and newspaper articles. Preston has become a sought-after commentator on popular science subjects.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Excerpts-
From the book
Part 1 Big Eye
When the alarm clock woke Juan Carrasco, the senior night assistant at Palomar Observatory, daylight was streaming through cracks in the black window shades of the bedroom. He got out of bed and tugged at a shade, which came up with a crackling sound. The shade had seen so much use that it had become crisscrossed with zigzag breaks, which he had patched with a type of transparent tape reinforced with nylon threads and known to the astronomers of Palomar Observatory as Palomar Glue, since it is used by them to fix almost anything that breaks. What he should do, he would say to himself, was get some new tape for these shades. Some black tape. To keep out the daylight, so he could sleep better. He found his glasses and looked over a ridge covered with manzanita to the tops of clouds popping up on the far side of the ridge, like torn cotton: a good sign. A sign of clear skies coming tonight. Juan crossed the bedroom, past a photograph of his wife, Lily, and himself taken on the day that Father Girán had married them, and took a leisurely shower.
Then he shaved. In the mirror, as he pulled foam from his face with a disposable razor, broad cheekbones emerged, under brown eyes. Shaving took a long time. He believed, in fact, that he had never properly gotten the hang of the throwaway razors. He was a former barber. He had learned to be very, very careful with a straight razor when working on a customer, and now he could not help being much too careful with a throwaway razor. He had never cut a customer, not even when one of those winos he used to practice on when he was in barber school slumped over in the barber’s chair or began thrashing around. To have a bloody, bellowing customer in the chair would have hurt his pride, and so he had never let his hand slip. An astronomer could groan more abnormally than a sick wino when there was trouble with the Hale Telescope, and so he tried never to let his hand slip at the controls. He rubbed a little grooming cream on his hair, which had begun to silver at the temples, and parted it on the left.
Juan dressed and went outdoors to examine the weather. He stood for a moment in his backyard, before the wild apple trees. Through their bare branches he saw last night’s snow on Mount San Jacinto, forty miles to the north, gleaming in the oblique sun. The intervening land was covered with a sheet of fog, but the sky above was creamy yet cloudless, the color of an old blue Chevrolet.
Lily was watching the San Diego evening news in the kitchen. She turned down the volume when Juan came in. He poured himself a mug of coffee while she served dinner, and she asked him who he was working with that night.
Juan Carrasco had a formal way of speaking about his job, the job of night assistant. He said that he was working with Dr. Maarten Schmidt, Donald Schneider, and Professor James E. Gunn. He told Lily that those astronomers had been having trouble with their instruments—a new experiment, something never tried before.
Lily noticed Juan’s worry. “Sometimes I wonder,” she once remarked to me, “if Juan hates to make mistakes.” When Juan had been a young father, he had carried his baby daughters around on pillows—he had been that afraid of breaking them. This man had thought you could break a baby just by handling it. This man had been made for handling the controls of great telescopes.
Juan turned up the television for the weather report. Night fog was coming, with marine winds. That was a good sign, and he began to feel that tonight could turn into a clear night for looking at...
About the Author-
Richard Preston received The Overseas Press Club of America's 1995 Whitman Bassow Award for "best reporting in any medium on environmental issues" for The Hot Zone. First Light, Preston's first book, won the American Institute of Physics Science Writing Award. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker. Preston lives in Princeton, New Jersey, with his wife and children.
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