To Know A Starry Night
By Paul Bogard and Beau Rogers
I received a free copy of To Know A Starry Night from the publisher in exchange for my honest opinion.
“Against a backdrop rich with purples, blues, and shades of black, a blaze of stars glittering across a vast empty sky spurs our curiosity about the past, driving us inevitably to ponder the future. For millennia, the night sky has been a collective canvas for our stories, maps, traditions, beliefs, and discoveries. Over the course of time, continents have formed and eroded, sea levels have risen and fallen, the chemistry of our atmosphere has changed, and yet the daily cycle of light to dark has remained pretty much the same . . . until the last 100 years.”
—Karen Trevino, from the foreword
No matter where we live, what language we speak, or what culture shapes our worldview, there is always the night. The darkness is a reminder of the ebb and flow, of an opportunity to recharge, of the movement of time. But how many of us have taken the time to truly know a starry night? To really know it.
Combining the lyrical writing of Paul Bogard with the stunning night-sky photography of Beau Rogers, To Know a Starry Nightexplores the powerful experience of being outside under a natural starry sky\–how important it is to human life, and how so many people don’t know this experience. As the night sky increasingly becomes flooded with artificial-light pollution, this poignant work helps us reconnect with the natural darkness of night, an experience that now, in our time, is fading from our lives.
Summary from Goodreads.
To Know A Starry Night is a coffee table book. If you have not head of this, then they are aimed to be books that you pick up occasionally to read but they are a very good feature for you coffee table. To Know A Starry Night is probably a very good example of this.
Let’s start with the photographs. They are absolutely stunning. Each image selected for this book was just beautiful. As someone who is interested in astrophotography, I am always very happy to see a book that has stunning photos of the night sky.
What makes To Know A Starry Night a coffee table book to me is the accompanying writing. I personally did not enjoy the anecdotal writing style very fitting to how vast the photographs were. While I understand and appreciate how the night sky affects everyone of us differently, I struggled to convince myself to read the words written on the page (unless the words were the location of the photograph). I ended up having to just stop reading the accompanying text since I was finding it such a drag compared to the beauty of the photographs.
Not exactly sure what I was wanting from To Know A Starry Night, but at least I enjoyed the pictures.
3/5
Have you are To Know A Starry Night? What did you think of it? Let me know in the comments below!
Check it out on Goodreads here.
Purchase it on Amazon here.
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