The sun

A thick tome on the sun, I thought, as I chosen up the package from the post, and in fact, it is a book that is all about the sun, turning the central star of our solar system. It is inconsistently the most misunderstood today star we know and the reference star is still for many astronomical state variables such as mass or luminosity.

If you expect good information about them - it's really about time that once again a book on the current results and findings of solar research is published - will be disappointed by the book, 

because the physics of the sun, despite the title not the issue here. Rather it is the world's various views on the sun, which the author - not a scientist but a five-time British fencing master, who has since taken the career in journalism and founded a publishing house named after him - has met on his travels.

In the beginning, a little disappointed, you need a certain time to read in this book, but then it gets interesting, because so varied the lost and surviving cultures in the world are, so are their ideas about the sun. Some of them seem to quite modern, others are characterized by mysticism and astrology. One goes with the author in a way scientific and spiritual journey to our home star, with first starts "pre-scientific considerations" and the first scientific considerations, their effect on the earth and its inhabitants, the use of calendars and navigation, and with the Sun symbolism of the depiction, in film and television, with classic writers and ideas for the future of the Sun ends.

Who can build the frequent intermingling of astronomy with more humanistic ideas will read this book with great profit, however, who expects a treatment of current scientific knowledge, should rather not even bother.