Eating the Sun: Small Musings on a Vast Universe
Says Maria Popova of Ella Frances Sanders' latest book,"In fifty-one miniature
essays, each accompanied by one of her playful and poignant ink-and-watercolor
drawings, Sanders goes on to explore a pleasingly wide array of scientific
mysteries and facts -- evolution, chaos theory, clouds, the color blue, the
nature of light, the wondrousness of octopuses, the measurement of time, Richard
Feynman's famous cataclysm sentence, the clockwork mesmerism of planetary
motion, our microbiome, the puzzlement of why we dream. What emerges is
something sweetly consonant with Nabokov's exultation at our "capacity to wonder
at trifles" -- except, of course, even the smallest and most invisible of these
processes, phenomena, and laws are not trifles but condensed miracles that make
the everythingness of everything we know."