Dust and Chemistry in Astronomy (The Graduate Series in Astronomy)

Book Description

Dust is widespread in the galaxy. To astronomers studying stars it may be just an irritating fog, but it is becoming widely recognized that cosmic dust plays an active role in astrochemistry. Without dust, the galaxy would have evolved differently, and planetary systems like ours would not have occurred. To explore and consolidate this active area of research, Dust and Chemistry in Astronomy covers the role of dust in the formation of molecules in the interstellar medium, with the exception of dust in the solar system. Each chapter provides thorough coverage of our understanding of interstellar dust, particularly its interaction with interstellar gas. Aimed at postgraduate researchers, the book also serves as a thorough review of this significant area of astrophysics for practicing astronomers and graduate students.

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There is Skill and ThenThere is Enjoyment
Another book that makes me ask what poetry actually is.
Bidart is a major poet
Wonderful.
Poems of Tenderness and Daring

Star Dust: Poems
Frank Bidart
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

ASIN: 0374269734
Release Date: 2005-05-26

Book Description

In 2002, Frank Bidart published a sequence of poems, Music Like Dirt, the first chapbook ever to be a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. From the beginning, he had conceived this sequence as the opening movement in a larger structure--now, with Star Dust, finally complete.

Throughout his work, Bidart has been uniquely alert to the dramatic possibilities of violence; in this, and in his sense of theater, he resembles the great Jacobean dramatists. It is no accident that Webster's plays echo in "The Third Hour of the Night," the brilliant long poem that dominates the second half of Star Dust. Bidart locates in Benvenuto Cellini the speaker truest to his own vision. Who better to speak of the drive to create, not as reverie or pleasure or afterthought, but as task and burden, thwarted by the world? In its scale, sonorities, extraordinary leaps, and juxtapositions, "The Third Hour of the Night" makes an astonishing counterbalance to the intense, spare lyrics that precede it.

In this profound and unforgettable new book, the dream beyond desire (which now seems to represent human destiny) is rooted in the drive to create, a drive tormented at every stage by failure, as the temporal being fights for its survival by making an eternal life. Bidart is a poet of passionate originality, and Star Dust shows that the forms of this originality continue to deepen and change as he constantly renews his contract with the idea of truth.

Customer Reviews:

There is Skill and ThenThere is Enjoyment.......2007-08-03

Sometimes I am reluctant to write reviews of the poetry I read. This is certainly a time when I was. I am certainly not a poet who has the reknown or the publication history of Frank Bidart but I do still have an opinion.

Reading _Star Dust_ was difficult. Not only is the poetry in a very academic style, but the poems are also replete w/ allusions to music and art. If these poems were in a school anthology there would have been a plethora of endnotes. We, however, were not given the help of that so I found other ways to discern what Bidart's references were all about.

I can see the skill of Frank Bidart. He is well educated and has an amazing ability to make his poems reflect upon each other as is best apparent with the final poem and how it relates to the earlier poems in the collection.

All this good and bad being said, for me, this isn't a book I would read again. I don't mind being challenged but I came away from this collection feeling that I was just being challenged because the poet was capable of doing so. This is not a collection I would read again.

I would say, however, that if you are looking for a good challenge-a puzzle-then sit with google and a marker and just see the layers that Bidart is capable of. It can be an adventure.

Another book that makes me ask what poetry actually is........2006-07-20

Frank Bidart, Star Dust (FSG, 2005)

I've just wandered through the already-posted Amazon reviews on this one, and it's pretty obvious that I'm in the minority. So I'll apologize beforehand, since it's obvious I'm wrong. After all, this collection was, in fact, a National Book Award finalist, though it lost to Merwin's Migration. Despite the overwhelming evidence that I am, in fact, wrong, I have to stick to my guns-- I just didn't like it anywhere near as much as everyone else seems to have.

First off, "The Third Hour of the Night" has to be addressed. The dramatic monologue, as a poetic device, has a long and revered history, as well it should. But the vast majority of dramatic monologues throughout the ages have been presented to us in formal verse, which allows for a freer language, because poetically it still has the form to fall back on; it's still unquestionably poetry. Doing dramatic monologues in free verse is exceptionally tricky; if you fall back into unpoetic language, you risk the entire house of cards toppling down around you, with your monologue looking like a speech that's been chopped up into little lines. It's worse when you're relating history. He central part of "The Third Hour of the Night," which takes up about a quarter of Star Dust's total length, tells us about Benvenuto Cellini. It's certainly not straight biographical information, but it still borders on the prosaic, and crosses over that line far too many times during its length. I know there's a lot of argument over this point, but to me, if it's too prosaic too many times, I simply can't look at it seriously as poetry.

Bookending the tome with "The Third Hour of the Night" is the chapbook Music Like Dirt, which focuses on the desire to create-- the primal, inborn desire. It would be easy to make cracks here about the primal urge needing some revision before it gets thrown to the wolves, but let's face it-- "The Third Hour of the Night" took up a whole issue of Poetry magazine in 2004. An entire issue. They've never done that before. Ever. And Poetry is the pinnacle. Whither goeth Poetry goeth a nation. Certainly whither goeth Poetry goeth the National Book Association.

But I still can't find a reason to consider it better than average. It's not worse than average, certainly, given how much less accomplished prosaic nonsense finds its way into magazines and webzines on a monthly basis, but it's not better, either. **

Bidart is a major poet.......2006-02-09

I have very little doubt that Frank Bidart is a
major American poet. What do I mean by that? I mean
that he has brought into American poetry something
altogether new - a voice that attempts to explore the
large questions about the human condition using the
ages old form of dramatic monologue in a completely
new way. To date, there are several such long "Bidart"
poems: "Herbert White", "Ellen West", "The War of
Vaslav Nijinsky", "The Second Hour of the Night" and
now, in this new collection, "The Third Hour of the
Night". The ambition of this life-long project is
enormous. The fact that his craft continues to live up
to this ambition is what makes Bidart a very special author at work today. In book after book after book he has
given us long, intense, self-contained poems that
explore essential components of human condition--from
our desire to our desire to make--with seriousness and
unmistakable genius. Genius is not a word I hesitate
to use when I write about Frank Bidart's life-long
work. This is the poet who has more in common with
Dostoevsky than with any of our contemporaries. Bidart
disdains the issues (such as critical theory or Irony,
with a capital "I", for instance) that obsess poets
today. Instead, he asks essential questions about what
it is to live in our time; he struggles with large,
unembarrassed emotions and original, serious ideas,
blending them together with force and spark.
This new collection, "Stardust," is particularly
interesting for its extended meditation on our wish to
be challenged by our actions, our need to produce
something meaningful from our time on this planet ("my
father's ring was B with a dart / through it, in
diamonds against polished black stone. // I have it.
What parents leave you / is their lives. Until my
mother died she struggled to make / a house that she
did not loathe; paintings; poems; me. / Many creatures
must / make, but only one must seek / within itself
what to make."). This exploration of creativity
culminates in "The Third Hour of the Night" where
Bidart spins the story of the Italian sculptor,
Benvenuto Cellini, asking moral questions in a
dramatic narrative rich with murder and desire to make
something beautiful, lasting enough to contain human
spirit. As unpredictable as the process of making
itself, the poem begins in Western notions of (and
struggle with) morality, and blends into an African
element of magic where violence and beauty are one
("In this universe anybody can kill anybody / with a
stick. What gods gave me / is their gift, the power to
bury within each / creature the hour it ceases. /
Everyone knows I have powers but not such power. / If
they knew I would be so famous / they would kill me. /
I tell you because your tongue is stone. / If the gods
ever give you words, one night in / sleep you will
wake to find me above you.) Here, Bidart does not just
expand on Stevens' dictum that "death is a mother of
beauty" - he makes of it a human necessity in a
beautifully written and highly vocal drama.
What is also striking for me about this new collection is how
many first rate short lyrics it contains. In Bidart's
earlier books he rarely included more than five or six
short poems along with his trademark long dramatic
monologue. This collection includes twenty two short
pieces, many of which (my own favorites-"Song",
"Romain Clerou", "The Soldier Who Guards the
Frontier", "Phenomenology of the Prick," "Curse,"
"Lament for the Makers," "Heart Beat," "Injunction",
"Hammer," "Luggage", "For Bill Nestrick")are destined to be
taught in schools and anthologized. His use of classical drama, most notably Shakespeare ("go make you ready") and the Jacobins is dazzling, and it further deepens the psychological
effect of his work. The fact that this Master poet, at
this stage of his career, is still changing his style,
unafraid to find and use new things is deeply
satisfying. There is more skill in Bidart's "Stardust"
than in all new-formalists and l-a-n-g-u-a-g-e poets
combined; the effects of his work are dizzying with
their musical unpredictability and narrative logic.
This is a book of beautiful, memorable poetry. I recommend it highly. --Ilya Kaminsky

Wonderful........2005-10-11

These poems are yet another extension of Bidart's talent and extraordinary ability to paint a picture for us through words - his choice AND placement of them!

Poems of Tenderness and Daring.......2005-06-14

The poems in Frank Bidart's STAR DUST are a world unto themselves. They provide all the nourishment one needs from literature by exploring what is most deeply definitive about our humanity: our ability to love and to fail at love and our ability to create. The final poem of the book, the long "Third Hour of the Night" about the Florentine sculptor, Benvenuto Cellini, reads like a nineteenth century European novel : its narrative fairly gallops. And like Dostoevsky, Bidart unflinchingly forces us to face the most difficult and urgent moral questions. Like his shaman in the final poem, Bidart dares to extract the heart of his subjects in order to examine it and then put it back. With Bidart as our guide we can travel through the underworld of his dark world vision and emerge edified and strengthened, if not entirely cleansed.

Stars Beneath Your Bed: The Surprising Story of Dust (Ala Notable Children's Books. Younger Readers (Awards))

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Fun and interesting
Surprisingly lovely, and informative

Stars Beneath Your Bed: The Surprising Story of Dust (Ala Notable Children's Books. Younger Readers (Awards))
April Pulley Sayre
Manufacturer: Greenwillow
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Science, Nature & How It Works | Children's Books | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 0060571888
Release Date: 2005-03-29

Book Description

What is dust?
More than you think.

What can it do?
You will be surprised.

Dust may seem small,
dark, dirty, and dull.
But it's the secret
behind one of the
largest, most colorful
sights on earth.

Customer Reviews:

Fun and interesting.......2007-06-27

What a neat story! A wonderful book with great illustrations. Fascinating facts at the end. All you ever wanted to know (and more) about dust. Did you know that if there is more dust it makes for a more colorful sunset? i had no idea...all because of dust. Wow. My kids were intrigued. Fun.

Surprisingly lovely, and informative.......2006-07-16

I enjoyed this lovely book very much, and think that young children will be astonished to learn about what dust is and where it comes from. Adults too!

The Stars, Like Dust (The Empire Novels)

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Interesting early Asimov "Empire" novel
Great series and, yes, sadly out of print...
Undemanding fun
WoW!
Foundation basics.

The Stars, Like Dust (The Empire Novels)
Isaac Asimov
Manufacturer: Spectra
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Mass Market Paperback

General | Science Fiction | Science Fiction & Fantasy | Subjects | Books

ASIN: 0553293435
Release Date: 1991-12-01

Customer Reviews:

Interesting early Asimov "Empire" novel.......2007-09-09

This is a very early work by the great Isaac Asimov that is set in the same Universe as his Foundation series. In this work, Mankind has colonized far and wide in the Galaxy, but there is no Galactic Empire or other unifying political entity. Planets are organized in small "kingdoms" of one or more planets, warfare is common, and humans still remember that Earth is the original planet of humanity. Thus, this novel is set in a time long after the 50 Spacer Worlds era, but long before the Foundation series, and even before "The Currents of Space" (where man had mostly forgotten that Earth is humanity's home world, and the Trantorian Republic is evolving into the Empire).

This is a rather basic story of a young nobleman who is opposing a tyrannical star system and searching for a secret document which his late father (murdered by the tyrants) believed would put an end to the totalitarian governments in the Galaxy. More would be telling.

The writing in this one is not bad, if one's expectations are not too high, and there are some interesting twists and speculative concepts woven into the story. There are some quaint anachronisms, like the complete absence of computers for tasks that even in our day would be computerized, but overall this novel has aged well and holds the modern reader's interest.

A good read and an early work by one of Science Fiction's giants.

Great series and, yes, sadly out of print..........2006-08-11

To correct a few people here, there are (were) actually three books in the 'Galactic Empire Series'.

The Stars, Like Dust: A novel of the days when warring star kingdoms wrought havoc, before Trantor gained ascendancy in the galaxy.

The Currents Of Space: A novel of the period when Trantor ruled only half the galaxy, and every independent kingdom guarded it's right to corruption.

Pebble In The Sky: A novel of the time when Trantor ruled the galaxy, while Earth dreamed of it's ancient glory - and plotted revenge.

From the '87 and '89 Ballantine/Del Rey printings of the series...

IF you can find them, and read them, you would enjoy them... I think the series is a great 'pre-Asimov' set for readers new to his writing. IMO...

Undemanding fun.......2005-02-02

Many of Isaac Asimov's novels and short stories were actually mystery tales dressed up in the veneer of science fiction. But THE STARS LIKE DUST reminded me of a genre that I had not yet come across in his fiction: the thriller. The influences aren't enormous, but they're present. There's a hunt for a secret document, a political power struggle, and a puppet master directing the action from behind the scenes. And as successful as Asimov had been at incorporating the fundamentals of the detective novel into his own, he is similarly triumphant here. While there are definitely some rough spots, they come more from the pulp origins of this kind of story than from any other genre it incorporated.

First of all, this is a typically engaging and engrossing story. It's not Asimov at the absolute top of his game, but it's easy enough for the reader to keep turning these pages. Even when he's running on autopilot (as one suspects during part of the plot's introduction and some of the later, quieter moments), it's nothing short of fun and enjoyable.

Asimov's plotting is again quite good. Indeed, there are some elements of it that reminded me of portions of his other books (for example, there's a character who makes bold and logical predictions about the movement of individual important people -- a very small scale version of the psychohistory that would appear later in his FOUNDATION series). But as with most of Asimov's work, while I did find it to contain a lot of familiar touchstones, it still felt very fresh.

There were a few points that prevented me from placing this among the very top of Asimov's novels. Characterization is something that Asimov himself said he didn't always get right (though I will sometimes give him more credit than he gave himself) and, unfortunately, it's difficult to believe in the romance between the male and female leads. He usually stayed away from this kind of coupling, and it seemed clear that he seemed a lot less confident writing about male/female relationships than he did about molecules, planetary movements and other science facts.

Speaking of science, it's also easy to see why Asimov's non-fiction writing was so effortless to read. He's quite good at making potentially intimidating science speeches seem clear and simple. Of course, what he isn't always quite so good at is incorporating them seamlessly into his plots. This book more so than most of his that I've read seemed to have a bit too many places where the characters suddenly deliver science lectures to other characters for no real overriding reason (yes, they related to the plot, but could easily have been removed with no loss of reader understand occurring). It's not that they're confusing -- far from it. It just made me think that they were included mostly because Asimov liked talking about science more than for any other reason.

On the other hand, I did like the fact that the science was important to the story. Oftentimes in science fiction novels, the actual mechanics of life in the future is hand-waved away. While that is sometimes desirable (if the author is more interested in plot and character than scientific speculation), I do occasionally enjoy the type of conjectures on display here. During the story's chase/traveling sequences we get some fun thinking from Asimov about how future space travel will work. It's fascinating, if only to see what the cutting edge of thought was in the early 1950s. Asimov puts a lot of thought into how faster-than-light travel will take place. But, amusingly from a modern standpoint, he missed out on computers completely, having the mathematical calculations of interstellar travel taking place by hand using libraries of reference books!

At the time of writing this review, THE STARS LIKE DUST would appear to be out-of-print. Which is a shame because it's a nice, enjoyable story that doesn't deserve relegation to hard-to-find status. This isn't top-tier Asimov, so I can't truthfully recommend spending a lot of money. But if you find a good, cheap, used copy, it's well worth purchasing. I read the bulk of it while airplane traveling and it made for a very happy, undemanding companion.

WoW!.......2004-01-01

I think it's a matter of taste - vive le difference and all that. For me, personally, this book, as part of the Empire series actually knocks the socks off the Foundation series, but no matter.

Its very nice that you CAN get this second hand fairly easily, if it was scarce, I could see some case for banging it out and issuing it on the net. But that would be very undesirable.

This book really does rock. I read this when I was 15, and that was a good time to read this kind of stuff. Very happy memories.
In fact, thinking about it, there is a huge swag of books that I saw in that period, authored by Bob Shaw and Asimov and a whole load of others. Why is it that these people are not being printed? I find it very difficult to understand. There is a peculiar theory though. I don't really know if I believe it or not.

Together with the Tom Swift books, these authors have managed to paint a picture of some sort of alternative America / Britain. Lets see. In this world, the space race didn't end in the 70's, and Vietnam did not happen, or the Iran Contra thing. Instead, there was a joint effort (while there were the natural resources to do it) to launch an international space station in the late 70's, a colony on the moon in 1994, and the first landing on Mars in 2002. Incidently this first landing was a one way ticket, the astronaut in question volunteering to die over there 'cause there wasn't the technology to get back.

Etc.

But that did not happen, ergo, this fiction is redundant, the future did not happen. So now we have this kind of Gothic horror stuff about nano technology uber alles, the great enthusiasm of exploration zipped in favour of commercial expansion and militarism, and a dumbing down of science. How many teenagers want to learn about non linear differential equations? Where are our scientists going to come from, if no-one likes this stuff nowadays?

It's the latter that really frightens me. Beagle has landed but has either been shot down by the USA or just malfunctioned.

And it's 2004 now for goodness sake. We should be FAR more advanced than this!

Why did Isaac Asimov have to go when he did... We really do need this guy now,or someone with the same kind of vision....

Foundation basics........2003-12-20

After reading Asimov's Foundation and Robot Novels I decided to read the "hard-to-find" Empire novels, which are always referred to as mediocre.
On my opinion, this first part of the series shows much of the content that Isaac Asimov would use for it's Foundation & Robots series; I can't qualify it as mediocre, it's a fine book to read and the proof of the evolution in the career of a science fiction writer. I recommend it.

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The Empire Novels
Isaac Asimov
Manufacturer: Science Fiction Book Club
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

General | Science Fiction | Science Fiction & Fantasy | Subjects | Books

ASIN: 0739431056

Product Description

Ominbus of "The Stars, Like Dust," "The Currents of Space," and "Pebble in the Sky." Special publication of the Science Fiction Book Club.

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The Stars, Like Dust (Empire Novels)

Manufacturer: Fawcett Crest
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
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ASIN: 0449023737

The Foundation Trilogy: Foundation, Foundation and Empire; Second Foundation - The Stars, Like Dust, The Naked Sun, I Robot -

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Fabulous REAL-FICTION stories

The Foundation Trilogy: Foundation, Foundation and Empire; Second Foundation - The Stars, Like Dust, The Naked Sun, I Robot -
Isaac Asimov
Manufacturer: Heinemann Octopus
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian (Conan of Cimmeria, Book 1)

ASIN: 0905712617

Customer Reviews:

Fabulous REAL-FICTION stories.......2004-06-17

Asimov did a hell of a job gathering all his stories in a series of books. In The Complete Stories Vol. 1 his handwrittings from the 1940's just up to 1967 are printed in a wonderful science-fiction masterpiece. Asimov is well reknowned as the father of SciFi, and this stories demonstrate how he can write about politics, medicine, science, anthropology, or even sexuality. This book gives you down-to-earth, really involving stories, that will surely catch your attention. You'll find stories about the gigantic Multivac predicting electorial votes from just one person; a robot flirtering his bosses' wife; a super-intelligent computer who wants to comit suicide; and lots of different stories in a wide variety of topics, but all related to SciFi.

From Dust To Stars: Studies of the Formation and Early Evolution of Stars (Springer Praxis Books / Astronomy and Planetary Sciences)

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From Dust To Stars: Studies of the Formation and Early Evolution of Stars (Springer Praxis Books / Astronomy and Planetary Sciences)
Norbert Schulz
Manufacturer: Springer
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 3540237119

Book Description

Studies of stellar formation in galaxies have a profound impact on our understanding of the present and the early universe. The book describes complex physical processes involved in the creation of stars and during their young lives. It illustrates how these processes reveal themselves from radio wavelengths to high energy X-rays and gamma -rays, with special reference towards high energy signatures. Several sections devoted to key analysis techniques demonstrate how modern research in this field is pursued.

Foundation; Foundation and Empire; Second Foundation; The Stars, Like Dust; The Naked Sun; I, Robot

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Foundation; Foundation and Empire; Second Foundation; The Stars, Like Dust; The Naked Sun; I, Robot

Manufacturer: Amaranth Press; Masters Library Ser.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Bonded Leather
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Prelude to Foundation (Foundation Novels)

ASIN: 0706421973

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THE STARS, LIKE DUST
Isaac ASIMOV
Manufacturer: Fawcett crest
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
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Robots and Empire

ASIN: B000IZVJFM

Customer Reviews:

A fine analysis of Supreme Court history.......2006-08-14

Jay Sekulow has demonstrated that he is one of America's most influential and able jurists through his work done in the name of defending First Amendment religious freedoms. Furthermore, he has exhibited outstanding advocacy skills through the work he has accomplished defending those freedoms as an oral advocate arguing appellate cases before the United States Supreme Court. In his book, Sekulow takes up the pen to explain how the religious upbrining and philosophical backgrounds of individual Supreme Court justices influenced their judicial philosophy and how they ruled on important cases before the Court.

The major thrust of Sekulow's thesis is that the religious attitudes and viewpoints of the Supreme Court justices underlayed their judicial philosophy and was the driving force behind and the impetus for the outcome reached in the particular cases that Sekulow analyzes. Sekulow illustrates how virtually every Supreme Court justice came from a Christian background, or if some will dispute this, atleast a theistic background with some judeo-christian presuppositions and beliefs. Moreover, Sekulow is fair in noting that, even though some justices were not distinctly Christian, their upbringing provided a basis for valuing religious freedom and viewing religion as a distinctly personal matter, but still one that should influence one's personal life and how they interact with society. Sekulow shows how many Supreme Court justices regarded Christianity as essential to ordered government and vital for American society's survivial and perseverance. Another interesting element to this book, is how Sekulow traces the emergence of the doctrine of the wall of separation between church and state. Sekulow persuasively advocates for the view that this constitutional doctrine, not actually enshrined in the words of the first amendment, arose due to the labors of concerned protestants who seeked to inhibit Catholics from receiving public money to fund private religious schools. My only criticism of this book is that Sekulow spends so much time analyzing religion that he fails to analyze other possible jurisprudential arguments. Although it may be true that religious motivations influenced individual justices, it is just as possible that each justice arrived at the conclusion they did because it was the proper legal result, and not just because the result comported with their religious beliefs. I wish Sekulow would have analyzed this dimension more because it would have strengthened his thesis in the long run. However, this is one small criticism to an otherwise excellent book.

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