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A Traveller's Guide to Mars: The Mysterious Landscapes of the Red Planet
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Workman Publishing (2003-09-26)
ISBN: 0761126066
EAN: 9780761126065
UPC: 019628126061
Dewy Decimal #: 919.92304
Paperback: 450 pages
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Editorial Reviews
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Amazon.co.uk Review
A Traveler's Guide to Mars revitalises the Red Planet, leaving readers with the urge to don spacesuits and take a long trip. With the look and heft of a guide to someplace you might actually go, the book presents Mars as a place of canyons and volcanoes, mesas and barren plains, not that dissimilar from parts of Earth. Author William K Hartmann, who participated in the Mars Global Surveyor mission, uses all the photos and data collected by scientists in decades of research to give a thorough, yet not boring, overview of the planet. The most exciting stuff is about water--whether it ever flowed on Mars, where it went, why it's hard to find. Beyond that, there are the rocks, dust and weather to talk about, and Mars has lots of all three. Sidebars, maps, and chronologies help keep the regions and geology of Mars organised. Hartmann never forgets he's writing for the lay reader, and his style is personable and clear. When answering claims of NASA cover-ups, ancient civilisations and hidden structures on Mars, he calmly lays out the facts and pictures, urging readers to simply examine the evidence. Hartmann offers a tourist's-eye view of one of our most intriguing planetary neighbours and does more to polish NASA's tarnished image than a thousand press releases. --Therese Littleton, Amazon.com
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Customer Reviews
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Interested in Mars? Buy this book!
Rating  (5)
Date: 2006-05-11
This might be the best book about Mars at present. Hartmann tells us all that was known before the Spirit and Opportunity rovers landed on the planet. And he tells us how we know this, by refering to a lot of observations and detailed pictures, explaining how they support some theories and reject others. By describing different parts of the planet, beautifully illustrated by highly interesting pictures, he shows how they tell tales of different eras and events in the planets changing history. We have to wait until the journey of the two rovers has come to and end, and the results of their missions have been thoroughly investigated, before we might have a book that can match this one. In the meantime this is the book that makes it a lot more fun to follow the discoveries of the rovers, and to understand their significance.
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A great book and a wonderful resource
Rating (5)
Date: 2005-04-07
2 out of 2 customers found this reveiw helpful
This fascinating book is the work of scientist, author and artist, William K. Hartmann. What this item is, really, is a travelogue about the planet Mars! Going interesting location by interesting location, the book takes the reader across the face of Mars, and through Martian history. Along the way, the reader is treated to *many* colorful pictures and maps. This is a great book, probably the best one that I have seen on the planet Mars! I loved the way that the book is organized; somehow the author succeeds in taking his narrative location by location, and yet having it form a coherent and very informative explanation of what Mars is like now, and how it came to be that way. Also, the fact that it was published in 2003 means that it is entirely up-to-date, with information gathered by the Viking probes, the Hubble space telescope, and the Mars Global Surveyor. Overall, I found this to be a great book and a wonderful resource. If you are interested in the planet Mars, then you really must get this book! I give it my highest recommendations.
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A Traveller's Guide to Mars
Rating (5)
Date: 2003-09-29
7 out of 7 customers found this reveiw helpful
A TRAVELLER'S GUIDE TO MARS is a mine of information, with a 'history' of observing Mars, images from all the missions, interpretations, comparisons with Earth, lots and lots of photos, and a few (sadly small) paintings by the author and at least one by Ron Miller ( a lovely 'digital' Martian city -- 3D, presumably). It's very readable, but also a book that you'll want to dip into time and again.
For anyone who doesn't know, the author is not only the astronomer and planetary scientist who came up with the currently most widely-accepted hypothesis of Moon formation (an impact on Earth by a Mars-sized body), but is also a space artist and a Fellow of the International Association of Astronomical Artists (IAAA) -- as is Ron Miller, whose own 'Worlds Beyond' series of books on the planets of our Solar System, with his own excellent artwork, is also available on this site.
Highly recommended.
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Retail Price: £13.99
Amazon.com's Price:£0.60
That's 96% Off!
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