Origin of Life

The Stardust Revolution: The New Story of Our Origin in the Stars. By Jacob Berkowitz. 2012. Prometheus Books. (ISBN 9781616145491). 376 pp. Hardback. $27.00. Whether you think of it as a revolution story, an evolution story, or even, simply, a history tale, reading this book by the science writer Jacob Berkowitz is like going on a discovery walk through the annals of who’s-who in astrobiology, a budding new field that studies the origin, evolution, and distribution of life on earth, in the universe, and more. It is filled with name-dropping, anecdotes (a bit of an overload of them), birthing analogies, and puns. NASA’s 1999 Stardust mission spent 200 million dollars to bring back stardust material that weighs less than a grain of salt, and now, we have a “catalog of more than ten thousand pre-solar grains” (5–7 billion years old). Hoagy Carmichael wrote and recorded it, Bing Crosby, Louis Armstrong, Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, Doris Day, Ringo Starr, and Rod Stewart (to name a few) sang about the “Stardust …