Although I do wish it had had more about total solar eclipses and maybe less about the scientists who witnessed the one in 1878, for what Baron set out to do, it was a total success.It ended with another beautiful sentence: 'For us, collectively - as a society, a nation, a civilization - they can have the same indelible, life-affirming effect.'Would that this one will, in these alarming times.Piñon pine trees, crackling campfires, craggy mountains, mining claims, and … astronomy? For one day in 1878, the allure of the American West had one more draw: 180 seconds of daytime darkness.

As I stood transfixed by this vision, I felt something I had never experienced before - a visceral connection to the universe.'It is not the sort of book I usually read, but as I will be in Oregon on Monday, in the path of totality, I am very glad I read it.

It looked like an enormous wreath woven from silvery thread, and it hung suspended in the immensity of space, shimmering. Above me, in the dim vault of the heavens, shone an incomprehensible object. What I had not anticipated was my own intense reaction to the display.For three glorious minutes, I felt transported to another planet, indeed to a higher plane of reality, as my consciousness departed the earth and I gaped at an alien sky. For 174 seconds, the blue sky would blacken, stars would appear, and the sun would manifest its ethereal outer atmosphere, the solar corona.

I bought this book totally because I heard Baron read the following paragraph on NPR:'As a science journalist, I thought I knew what to expect. A magnificent portrayal of America's dawn as a scientific superpower, American Eclipse depicts a young nation that looked to the skies to reveal its towering ambition and expose its latent genius. With spellbinding accounts of train robberies and Indian skirmishes, the mythologized age of the last days of the Wild West comes alive as never before. David Baron brings to three-dimensional life these three competitors-James Craig Watson, Maria Mitchell, and Thomas Edison-and thrillingly re-creates the fierce jockeying of nineteenth-century American astronomy.

And a young, megalomaniacal inventor, with the tabloid press fast on his heels, sought to test his scientific bona fides and light the world through his revelations. Another-an adventuresome female astronomer-fought to prove that science was not anathema to femininity. In the scorching summer of 1878, with the Gilded Age in its infancy, three tenacious and brilliant scientists raced to Wyoming and Colorado to observe a rare total solar eclipse.

American eclipse baron