Rating: 
Summary: A delightful read, astronomy history buffs will love it...
Review: Along the lines of Longitude, where Dava Sobel took us on a walk through astronomical history with the focus on the effort to determine longitude at sea, Hirshfeld's "Parallax" is an engaging historical survey concentrating on efforts to detect that minute wobble of stars. Hirshfeld focuses on the personalities and people - which makes this story enjoyable and even riveting.Copernicus' view of the heavens had long since prevailed - no serious person of science doubted that the Earth and planets orbited the sun. However, there was no concrete scientific evidence to prove the Copernican view. The acid test of the Earth's motion, slight displacement of stars in June and December, when the Earth is on opposite sides of its orbit, had still not been detected. Hirshfeld traces the story from the earliest Greeks through Hooke, Newton, Bessel, Bradley and many others. It's a great story, well told.
Rating:
Summary: A delightful read, astronomy history buffs will love it...
Review: Along the lines of Longitude, where Dava Sobel took us on a walk through astronomical history with the focus on the effort to determine longitude at sea, Hirshfeld's "Parallax" is an engaging historical survey concentrating on efforts to detect that minute wobble of stars. Hirshfeld focuses on the personalities and people - which makes this story enjoyable and even riveting. Copernicus' view of the heavens had long since prevailed - no serious person of science doubted that the Earth and planets orbited the sun. However, there was no concrete scientific evidence to prove the Copernican view. The acid test of the Earth's motion, slight displacement of stars in June and December, when the Earth is on opposite sides of its orbit, had still not been detected. Hirshfeld traces the story from the earliest Greeks through Hooke, Newton, Bessel, Bradley and many others. It's a great story, well told.
Rating:
Summary: Casual History
Review: I enjoyed the casual and often humorous style in which this book conveyed the history and development of astronomy. It's a must read for any amateur astronomer.
Rating:
Summary: Fully Entertaining
Review: I hated to see this book come to it's conclusion. Dr. Hirshfeld did some great detective work and used just enough humor to keep me interested from cover to cover. The writing is easily understood by a layperson such as myself, yet I felt that I was guided along in the quest for the proof of where the Earth is positioned in the universe.
Rating:
Summary: Sometimes It Takes More Than Just A Clever Mind
Review: In science, clever minds and precision equipment go hand in hand. Take string theory - it sounds great [and I personally hope it's correct], but we don't have the equipment needed to do the experiments. In the book Parallax by Alan W. Hirshfeld, we take an almost two thousand year journey through history trying to confirm or deny the existence of stellar parallax - the apparent motion of a star due to the Earth's revolution. Hirshfeld introduces us to great scientific mind after scientific mind, all who knew exactly what they should see, but all thwarted in their efforts until the science of telescope making caught up with their brilliant minds. Since we know where the journey ends, part of the fun of reading Parallax comes from Hirshfeld's vivid portraits of the lives of the philosophers, astronomers, and instrument makers involved with finding stellar parallax. My favorite portrait was of Joseph Fraunhofer, telescope maker extraordinaire and survivor of incredible childhood trauma. I highly recommend Parallax by Alan W. Hirshfeld to anyone with an interest in astronomy, the history of science, or instrument making.
Rating: 
Summary: History A, Astronomy C-
Review: Perhaps I bought the wrong book. Because it came from a working astronomer and educator, I expected it to have more technical content. One glaring error (page 166, final full paragraph) made me wonder about the quality of the editing of the manuscript. It's an entertaining book, but short of compelling.
Rating:
Summary: A Truly Well-Written Labor of Love
Review: There have been a lot of history of science books over the last few years - Dava Sobel in particular is very popular. If you like books by her or Jared Diamond or Amir Aczel, you'll love this volume. A smooth read, but with plenty of meat. The theme of the book is also rather more important than that of Sobel's Longitude; the program for the search for parallax was laid out in Galileo's Starry Messenger, and drove astronomical progress for centuries, and is still an important area of research, while remaining mostly unkown to the public. The only scientific theme which lasted longer, or generated more incidental progress, was the search for a proof of Fermat's theorem. I don't think you can grasp the history of science without being exposed to the material in this book. Give a copy to the budding bookish teenager in your life.
Rating:
Summary: If you like science history, don't overlook this book
Review: There have been a lot of history of science books over the last few years - Dava Sobel in particular is very popular. If you like books by her or Jared Diamond or Amir Aczel, you'll love this volume. A smooth read, but with plenty of meat. The theme of the book is also rather more important than that of Sobel's Longitude; the program for the search for parallax was laid out in Galileo's Starry Messenger, and drove astronomical progress for centuries, and is still an important area of research, while remaining mostly unkown to the public. The only scientific theme which lasted longer, or generated more incidental progress, was the search for a proof of Fermat's theorem. I don't think you can grasp the history of science without being exposed to the material in this book. Give a copy to the budding bookish teenager in your life.
Rating:
Summary: magnificent
Review: This is the best book on popular astonomy that I have read in many years, perhaps ever. It is hard to imagine a more balanced, better organized and readable description of a thorny technical topic than is presented here. In the mini-biographies of astonomers for 2,500 years, one is reminded ot Richard Rhodes book "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" in which he capsules 20th century science, Chemistry in particular. Hirshfeld provides interesting and often amusing thumbnail sketches of all the Parallax protagonists from Aristarchus to the present. His descriptions of Tycho Brahe, Galileo and Kepler are particularlly vivid. I had always read that Tycho had his nose bitten off in a drunken brawl, but, alas, not so! It was in a drunken duel. The balance of the book is outstanding; each progression of understanding of the magnitude of the problem is presented with equal weight. The actual magnitude and dimensions of the problem (physically measuring the movement of a star from the exremes of the earths orbit) are described in bite sized increments, until by the time that the problem is surmounted in the mid 1800s, the full appreciation of the achievement is inescapable. If genius is "an infinite capacitiy for details", then the astronomers, and Dr. Hirshfeld both fully qualify for the title. I am enthusiastically recommending this book to every literate person I know. It is satisfying and mind stretching, beautifully constructed, illustrated and edited. A great book!
Rating:
Summary: Best science-related book I've read in a long time
Review: Very impressive and entertaining work by Dr. Hirshfeld. The amount of historical research that must have gone into this book is stunning. He covers over 2,000 years of the history of astronomy and astronomers, from Aristarchus to Ptolemy to Copernicus to the 19th Century and into the modern era. And he puts it together is an extremely readable and compelling way. Perhaps the single best thing about the book is how the author doesn't shy away from describing the science and technology at the root of the human story he is telling, yet he presents it all in a way that is understandable and interesting whether you are an expert or a novice. I have read many books and articles on the history of astronomy in the past, and hands down this is one of my absolute favorites.
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