Review: Voyager
Voyager by Stephen Pyne
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
This was a regrettable book. Half of it was pretty good and the other half was unreadable.
The juxtaposition of the first two great ages of discovery with the third (culminating in the Voyager mission) is a logical comparison, but Pyne’s attempt falls far short of enjoyable. The chief offense of our purportedly award-winning author is that he forces this loosely braided narrative down the reader’s throat with no regard to it’s success.
In each chapter he establishes a rough theme about discovery then erratically jumps from the (very good) technical discussion of the Voyager mission to some of the most lofty, pretentious and difficult to follow mish-mash of European history I have ever encountered. During the latter, he throws around obscure historical figures and events with absolutely no chronology, qualification or explanation, speaking as if he’s delivering a lecture to a conference of history professors. Then he uses an obnoxious number of $20 words just to showcase his vocabulary, which truly detracts from the story on just about every page of the book.
Making matters worse, the segue between the space and historical narratives almost always included some form of the classic high school book report hand-off "There were similarities as well as differences," which was just absolutely terrible.
To be sure, the parts of the book that were about the twin Voyager spacecrafts making their way through and beyond the solar system were interesting, well-tempered and well-written. Clearly his lack of expertise regarding the Voyager mission made his reportage infinitely more enjoyable because he couldn’t demonstrate his exhaustive (and exhausting) knowledge of arcana.
I think Voyager was actually two books hacked to bits and reassembled as some sort of academic exercise. To remedy this I decided about half-way through to only read the parts about the Voyager mission and I’m confident that I lost little in the process.
If you DO want to read a solid book about the great ages of discovery, I highly recommend The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes. He’s not a douche.
