Patti O'Shea's Blog

My latest audio book was How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming by Mike Brown. This is non-fiction by an astronomer who played an instrumental role in Pluto being demoted from planet-hood.

The book’s focus is largely on the discovery of Eris, the "dwarf planet" that’s slightly bigger than Pluto, although it also spends time on earlier discoveries that Brown and his team made of other objects orbiting in the Kuiper Belt. The story culminates with how Pluto was voted out at a meeting of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) in Prague.

As I’ve mentioned before, I have an interest in astronomy and one of the grade school dreams was to be an astronomer one day. I even took an intro to astronomy class in college. I’ll confess that I didn’t like Pluto being demoted. Maybe Saturn and Neptune are my favorite planets, but hey, Pluto is pretty cool, right? How could they vote it out after all these years? But as I listened to the arguments against Pluto, well, they made sense. I wish they hadn’t, but there you go.

I found the book overall to be interesting. I enjoyed hearing about the discoveries of large objects in the Kuiper Belt and the stories behind them. I liked hearing about the steps the team went through to verify and study these objects before announcing them and the intrigue that surrounded the object nicknamed Santa added drama and a sense of indignation that another astronomer nefariously tried to steal the discovery from this team at Cal Tech.

But as fascinating as I found all the astronomy stuff to be, I can’t recommend the book wholeheartedly. Brown wasted a ton of space talking about his first child. Some sections of Lila talk went on so long, my eyes were rolling back into my head. If I wanted to hear baby/children stories, I would have bought a book about that topic. I wanted to hear astronomy. His editor should have done a hard pruning and encouraged him to write more about Eris or anything else associated with astronomy and much less "indulgent parent gushing over child" stuff. A little bit of personal information is fine, it makes the author more human, but the extended stretches of stories about how long Lila slept at night, how many times she ate, etc were not even remotely interesting. The biggest disadvantages to audio books is how hard it is to skip the tedious parts.

So if you’re interested in how Pluto was demoted, I’d recommend buying the paper version of this book for easy skipping of all the baby/child talk. Without that, there is a very interesting core that focused on astronomy and provided a compelling argument for tossing our ninth planet out of the classification.

A qualified thumbs up.

Super Freakonomics is the follow-up to Freakonomics. I’ll confess that I’ve never read the first book, but I did listen to the second book and loved it!

As a journalism major in college, I was required to take both macro and micro economics. I’d also had economics in high school, but none of the classes I’ve had was even half as entertaining as this book was. The book’s focus is on microeconomics and behavioral economics and looks at things like prostitution, how often doctors wash their hands, car seats, terrorism, and global warming.

Yes, definitely quite a wide variety of topics!

Everything was presented in such an interesting, entertaining manner that even topics I thought wouldn’t be particularly riveting, held my attention. One of the co-authors reads the book, and while this is not something I’m normally a fan of, it works here because he’s got a great voice and does just read the words. He performs them the way a good voice actor should.

One of the more interesting topics focused on crime and that incident in New York from the 1960s? 1970s? The one where the woman was stabbed to death in front of 15 or so witnesses and no one stepped in to help. Apparently, the account wasn’t entirely accurate and there are quotes and stuff from the people who lived there and people who investigated it after the fact.

The best part, though, of the entire book is the epilogue. They talk about a researcher who was working with monkeys and teaching them to use money. I was laughing quietly in my cube as I listened to this section and the ending of the book was great!

Highly recommended.