Lost in Lualand

Rebecca Boyle's Our Moon: A Human History was a fun read! Clean prose but also poetic in places, with sometimes cheeky delivery that doesn't fully spell out the joke or the implications. She says things like, "The Apollo missions were designed to use the Moon as a tool. It was an instrument of might, just as surely as it was for the stone circles of northern Scotland, the Nebra sky disk, and the temples dedicated to Sin. Americans walked up there to show they could do it, and in doing so, demonstrated what glory was possible through democratic republicanism and white Protestant Christianity, rather than Soviet communism and godlessness." A journey of meaning, in a chain all the way back to the earliest times.

The book is split into three sections:

• How the Moon Was Made, detailing the physical characteristics of the moon, what it's made of, how its physical characteristics are different from Earth, the Theia hypothesis, and a general overview of its movements in the sky;


• How the Moon Made Us, detailing the hypothesis of how moon helped evolution via the tides which forced our sea ancestors into amphibious environments, and then of how the moon helped our human ancestors conceptualize time and time-keeping and future planning, which eventually led to civilisation;


• How We Made the Moon, detailing our projections of religious, emotional and scientific meaning onto the moon, culminating in modern and future moon exploration, feat. the usual suspects of Ptolemy, Copernicus, Galileo, etc.

Lovely journey of exploration and very readable, though I did have to look up some things for better understanding, like the synodic month. I have such difficulty picturing such things in my head! And have to constantly correct the mental picture I have that the moon moves with the night sky, when we can literally see the moon in the sky in daytime. For me, it's somewhat similar to the perception of up and down, which gets tossed if I stand outside at night in low light pollution and the huge huge night sky makes me feel like I could fall into it.

There's also a section about how the moon may actually affect our health in very subtle ways, with reports on possible links to depression and anger. I initially doubletaked like, is she talking horoscope-type effects? But then I remembered how atmospheric pressure does cause migraines and arthritic symptoms, and I myself feel a stinging pressure along my old surgery scars when there's a thunderstorm coming. We are made of lots of liquid, after all.