Book Review: How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming

Books are wonderful.  Bookstores are wonderful.  Used books are wonderful.  Parents buying things for you is wonderful.  I was lucky enough to have all these things come together the other week and I walked away with two new books.  Wonderful!  One of them I had never heard of, but it happened to catch my interest.  I tend to be very fascinated with the physics, especially the very large and the very small (though many would argue that this covers all but the most simple and obvious forms of studied physics).  I love astrophysics and I also love (with an assist on the naming from Wikipedia) particle physics.  But that's another conversation entirely.  The book I found was How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming by a physicist named Mike Brown.

Really, Pluto is pretty lucky to be known by anybody.  Don't feel too bad for him.

Now, I admittedly have a bit of a bias, but I'm pretty sure that this book would entertain and successfully educate most people.  Even those who aren't "science people".  Brown tells the story of his journey through his initial interest in planetary astronomy, his discovery of various stellar objects including one that would eventually lead to the death of Pluto as a planet, and the politics and aftermath of all this.  More importantly, he weaves in the story of his life, his family, and the birth of his daughter Lilah (he often confesses to forgetting significant events of days that were important professionally while displaying an ability to recall the smallest minutiae in his daughter's life - as it should be).

This Pluto is pretty cool.  And he's discussed many times in the book.

The book is funny, educational, and short enough to get through in one or two days.  Hopefully you can gain much knowledge about our solar system, the history of astronomy, a touch of linguistics and geology, and obviously our planets (and eventually dwarf planets), but even if you refuse to absorb any of this, you can enjoy a touching memoir with many humorous moments.

This is one of those books that I didn't want to end.  I highly recommend it.  Feel free to borrow!