Mask of the Sun

What do Virginia Woolf, the rotation of hurricanes, Babylonian kings, and Einstein s Theory of General Relativity all have in common? Eclipses. Always spectacular and, today, precisely predicable, eclipses have allowed us to know when the first Olympic games were played and that the Moon was covered [...]
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What do Virginia Woolf, the rotation of hurricanes, Babylonian kings, and Einstein s Theory of General Relativity all have in common? Eclipses. Always spectacular and, today, precisely predicable, eclipses have allowed us to know when the first Olympic games were played and that the Moon was covered by dust long before the first space probe. Eclipses have stunned, frightened, emboldened and mesmerized people for thousands of years. They are recorded on ancient turtle shells in China, on clay tablets from Iraq and on the Mayan Dresden Codex. They are mentioned in Homer s Iliad and Odyssey and at least eight times in the Bible. Columbus used an eclipse to trick people on Jamaica to supply provisions to his crew. Renaissance painter Taddeo Gaddi was blinded by one. Sorcery was banished within the Catholic Church after astrologers used an eclipse to predict a pope s death.In Mask of the Sun, acclaimed writer John Dvorak tells why the number 177 is important in eclipse prediction, why the ancient Romans thought it was bad to have sexual intercourse during an eclipse, and why even today pregnant women in Mexico wear safety pins on their underwear during an eclipse.Both entertaining and authoritative, Mask of the Sun recounts the forgotten lore behind this amazing phenomena and reveals the humanism behind the science of both lunar and solar eclipses. With insightful detail and vividly accessible prose, Dvorak provides explanations as to how and why eclipses occur as well as insight into the forthcoming eclipse of 2017 that will be visible across North America."