Download Free Observations Of The Transit Of Venus Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Observations Of The Transit Of Venus and write the review.

The award-winning, New York Times bestselling literary masterpiece of Shirley Hazzard—the story of two beautiful orphan sisters whose fates are as moving and wonderful, and yet as predestined, as the transits of the planets themselves A Penguin Classic Considered "one of the great English-language novels of the twentieth century" (The Paris Review), The Transit of Venus follows Caroline and Grace Bell as they leave Australia to begin a new life in post-war England. From Sydney to London, New York, and Stockholm, and from the 1950s to the 1980s, the two sisters experience seduction and abandonment, marriage and widowhood, love and betrayal. With exquisite, breathtaking prose, Australian novelist Shirley Hazzard tells the story of the displacements and absurdities of modern life. The result is at once an intricately plotted Greek tragedy, a sweeping family saga, and a desperate love story.
A “thrilling adventure story" (San Francisco Chronicle) that brings to life the astronomers who in the 1700s embarked upon a quest to calculate the size of the solar system, and paints a vivid portrait of the collaborations, rivalries, and volatile international politics that hindered them at every turn. • From the author of Magnificent Rebels and New York Times bestseller The Invention of Nature. On June 6, 1761, the world paused to observe a momentous occasion: the first transit of Venus between the Earth and the Sun in more than a century. Through that observation, astronomers could calculate the size of the solar system—but only if they could compile data from many different points of the globe, all recorded during the short period of the transit. Overcoming incredible odds and political strife, astronomers from Britain, France, Russia, Germany, Sweden, and the American colonies set up observatories in the remotest corners of the world, only to be thwarted by unpredictable weather and warring armies. Fortunately, transits of Venus occur in pairs; eight years later, they would have another opportunity to succeed. Thanks to these scientists, neither our conception of the universe nor the nature of scientific research would ever be the same.
The treatise by Jeremiah Horrocks (1618-1641) on the transit of Venus of 1639 is an account of an important astronomical observation, as well as an analysis and commentary on the changing state and practice of astronomy during the significant period between the achievements of Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) and Isaac Newton (1642-1727). This work has, in addition, the power to delight and charm us as the record of a young astronomer’s encounter with a rare astronomical event and the manner in which he discovered, observed, and drew conclusions from it. Its appeal is heightened by the knowledge that a self-trained young man stole a march on all the astronomers of his day.
Traces the impact on astronomy and science of the six times that the planet Venus has passed in front of the Sun since the discovery of the telescope in the seventeenth century, and discusses the 2012 transit, the last in this century.
In this unique and fascinating history of science, acclaimed popular science writer Sheehan and award-winning geographer Westfall take readers back through the centuries to chronicle the intrepid explorations of scientists and adventurers who studied the transits of Venus in the quest for scientific understanding. Maps & tables.
Spanning the 1960s to the 2000s, these nonfiction writings showcase Shirley Hazzard's extensive thinking on global politics, international relations, the history and fraught present of Western literary culture, and postwar life in Europe and Asia. They add essential clarity to the themes that dominate her award-winning fiction and expand the intellectual registers in which her writings work. Hazzard writes about her employment at the United Nations and the institution's manifold failings. She shares her personal experience with the aftermath of the Hiroshima atomic bombing and the nature of life in late-1940s Hong Kong. She speaks to the decline of the hero as a public figure in Western literature and affirms the ongoing power of fiction to console, inspire, and direct human life, despite—or maybe because of—the world's disheartening realities. Cementing Hazzard's place as one of the twentieth century's sharpest and most versatile thinkers, this collection also encapsulates for readers the critical events defining postwar letters, thought, and politics.
Martha Gellhorn was one of the first—and most widely read—female war correspondents of the twentieth century. She is best known for her fearless reporting in Europe before and during WWII and for her brief marriage to Ernest Hemingway, but she was also an acclaimed novelist. In 1938, before the Munich pact, Gellhorn visited Prague and witnessed its transformation from a proud democracy preparing to battle Hitler to a country occupied by the German army. Born out of this experience, A Stricken Field follows a journalist who returns to Prague after its annexation and finds her efforts to obtain help for the refugees and to convey the shocking state of the country both frustrating and futile. A convincing account of a people under the brutal oppression of the Gestapo, A Stricken Field is Gellhorn’s most powerful work of fiction. “[A] brave, final novel. Its writing is quick with movement and with sympathy; its people alive with death, if one can put it that way. It leaves one with aching heart and questing mind.”—New York Herald Tribune “The translation of [Gellhorn’s] personal testimony into the form of a novel has . . . force and point.”—Times Literary Supplement