{"id":11539,"date":"2021-03-10T17:07:28","date_gmt":"2021-03-11T01:07:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/?p=11539"},"modified":"2021-03-10T17:16:34","modified_gmt":"2021-03-11T01:16:34","slug":"nonfiction-notes-carl-sagans-billions-billions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/2021\/03\/10\/nonfiction-notes-carl-sagans-billions-billions\/","title":{"rendered":"Nonfiction Notes: Carl Sagan’s BILLIONS & BILLIONS"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Carl Sagan: BILLIONS & BILLIONS: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium<\/strong> (1996, Random House)<\/p>\n

This was Carl Sagan\u2019s final book, it says, published in 1997 not long after his premature death in 1996 at age 62. Actually, there was one further book, The Varieties of Scientific Experience<\/strong>, published in 2006, based on a series of 1985 lectures, belatedly assembled by his widow Ann Druyan. (Post about it here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

This book is a collection of essays on various topics, many, the author acknowledges, based on shorter essays written for Parade<\/em> magazine<\/a>. This is an interesting point for a couple reasons. Parade<\/em> is a Sunday supplement magazine that\u2019s been distributed to newspapers in the US for decades, and so its topics have always been light. Also because these days, as I see it inside the San Francisco Chronicle<\/em>, it\u2019s very thin, mostly full of ads and clickbait-like lists of recipes or celebrity factoids (and a quarter page single Q&A by Marilyn Vos Savant), with no essays even approaching a 10th<\/sup> the length of Sagan\u2019s essays in this book. Parade<\/em> in the 1980s and \u201890s, when most of these essays were first published, must have been quite different.<\/p>\n


\nThe book is divided into three sections:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The Power and Beauty of Quantification<\/li>\n
  2. What Are Conservatives Conserving?<\/li>\n
  3. Where Hearts and Minds Collide<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Highlights:<\/p>\n