Photo by Guzmán Barquín on unsplash
Our Moon is organized into three parts. In the first part, Boyle looks at the origins of the Moon. I thought the science on this was relatively settled: billions of years ago a horrific asteroid collision had caused a chunk of the Earth to tear off and form the Moon. It turns out the story is far more complicated and the formation of both the Earth and the Moon are much more deeply intertwined…
In the second part, Boyle examines the Moon’s role in the evolution of life on Earth, and in the development of human culture, religion and early science. This was fascinating and quite new to me…
In the final part of Our Moon, Boyle shows how our conception of the Moon has changed as our scientific understanding of it has grown…
There were a couple of places where I thought Our Moon dragged or where the book dove deeply into a topic that seemed only tenuously related to the Moon. Also there’s virtually no discussion about the Moon in Asian cultures and history. This seems like a significant gap…
Overall, though, Our Moon tells a fascinating story about how the Moon has shaped our world, physically, biologically, culturally, scientifically and spiritually. ~ Harry Katz
