Prolific nature writer Craig Childs (The Secret Knowledge of Water; Atlas of a Lost World) takes readers on a journey away from the light with The Wild Dark: Finding the Night Sky in the Age of Light. He's in search of a clear view of the heavens, stars, constellations, planets, galaxies, and beyond--and all that they stand for--and offers a quest narrative with a circular structure, which starts and ends in that bastion of illumination, Las Vegas, Nev.
Childs teamed up with an old friend and fellow adventurer, Irvin Fox-Fernandez, and together the two men rode loaded off-road bicycles north out of the city, which his friend called "Bortle-hopping." Bortle, Childs explains, "is a naked-eye scale for determining a night sky's quality"; in this book, Childs describes moving from Las Vegas's Bortle 9 to the joys and profundities of Bortle 1, "where only stellar light and backscatter from sunshine in space can be seen." He chronicles this trip with lyricism, gentle humor, and an obvious passion for darkness preserved, for the human ability to consider something larger than ourselves: "Beaming overhead, they live their lives regardless of how we see them, and for all I've heard that stars don't care, I disagree. I just don't know what they care about." As environmental causes go, this one entails an easy fix: just turn the lights off. Referring to mythology, biology, archeoastronomy, and more, Childs makes a strong argument.
Beautifully written, fervent, and lavish in imagery both light and dark, The Wild Dark is a moving call to action. --Julia Kastner, blogger at pagesofjulia