سقوط سیاره: دیدگاه‌های جدید از منظومه شمسی

Thanks to the photographic output of a small squadron of interplanetary spacecraft, we have awakened to the beauty and splendor of the solar system. Since Michael Benson's masterful book Beyond: Visions of the Interplanetary Probes , new, more powerful cameras in probes with greatly improved maneuverability have traversed the wheeling satellites of Jupiter; roamed the boulder-strewn red deserts of Mars; studied Saturn's immaculate rings; and shown us our own ravishing Earth, a blue-white orb with a disturbingly thin atmosphere, as it plunges deeper into ecological crisis. These new images are the subject of Benson's Planetfall , a truly revelatory book that uses its large page size to reproduce the greatest achievements in contemporary planetary photography as never before. Praise for Planetfall : "All retrospectives, art and otherwise, should shock us awake the way this one does . . . Planetfall is a book of science through and through, but it also deepens our sense of the miracle and the mystery of the universe, of our eye-blink lives." - The New York Times "This is the way I like to tour the solar system. Find a chair. Sit. Turn some pages. Gaze. Wonder." -NPR.com "Beautiful interplanetary images." -MSNBC.com "Beautiful visions of what's out there." - The Huffington Post "To encounter a Benson landscape is to be in awe of not only how he sees the universe, but also the ways in which he composes the never-ending celestial ballet." -Time.com "One secret withheld to protect humanity's future might be its undoing... Renata Ghali believed in Lee Suh-Mi's vision of a world far beyond Earth, calling to humanity. A planet promising to reveal the truth about our place in the cosmos, untainted by overpopulation, pollution, and war. Ren believed in that vision enough to give up everything to follow Suh-Mi into the unknown. More than twenty-two years have passed since Ren and the rest of the faithful braved the starry abyss and established a colony at the base of an enigmatic alien structure where Suh-Mi has since resided, alone. All that time, Ren has worked hard as the colony's 3-D printer engineer, creating the tools necessary for human survival in an alien environment, and harboring a devastating secret. Ren continues to perpetuate the lie forming the foundation of the colony for the good of her fellow colonists, despite the personal cost. Then a stranger appears, far too young to have been part of the first planetfall, a man who bears a remarkable resemblance to Suh-Mi. The truth Ren has concealed since planetfall can no longer be hidden. And its revelation might tear the colony apart.."-- Renata Ghali believed in Lee Suh-Mi's vision of a world far beyond Earth, a planet promising to reveal the truth about our place in the cosmos, untainted by overpopulation, pollution, and war. Ren believed in that vision enough to give up everything to follow Suh-Mi into the unknown. More than twenty years have passed since Ren and the rest of the faithful braved the starry abyss and established a colony at the base of an enigmatic alien structure where Suh-Mi has since resided, alone. Ren has worked hard as the colony's 3-D printer engineer, creating the tools necessary for human survival in an alien environment-and harboring a devastating secret. For the good of her fellow colonists, Ren continues to perpetuate the lie forming the foundation of the colony, despite the personal cost. Then a stranger appears, far too young to have been part of the first planetfall, a man who bears a remarkable resemblance to Suh-Mi. The truth Ren has concealed since planetfall can no longer be hidden, and its revelation could tear the colony apart

This biography tells the story of how a great intellect, Noam Chomsky's, was shaped. It describes the political and intellectual contexts that helped form the unyielding principles by which Chomsky lives, and the arenas of scholarship, political action, and ideology to which he still contributes. Along the way, the book provides an engaging political history of the last several decades, and many insights into how history too often gets rewritten. Chomsky's views on the uses and misuses of the university are highlighted, as are his doubts about the legitimacy of post-modernist inquiry, and his overall assessment of useful political engagement.

In a sense, this book strives to be the autobiography that Chomsky will probably never write by letting Chomsky speak for himself on the matters of greatest concern to him, through well-placed excerpts from his copious body of published writings and unpublished corespondence.