Press coverage (Mar. 27)
It can be tough to make the world of centuries ago feel alive, but Anderson does an excellent job of it, writing with a feel for just-right detail to evoke the drama of the 1769 expeditions to view the transit. He focuses on three: the voyage of French astonomer Jean-Baptiste Chappe c'Auteroche to South America; English Captain James Cook's to the Pacific; and Hungarian priest Maximilian Hell's to the Arctic. The last is of particular interest as the first English-language recounting of the trip, based on expedition journals (Anderson had them translated for the book).
In each case, Anderson employs the tools of a novelist, dramatizing the adventurers' tales in grand style. Such stuff seems to always require a certain suspension of disbelief—a good guess is, of course, all anyone has when it comes to a real person's thoughts. Go with it, and you'll find Anderson's prose gleaming with a stout and convincing imagining of the past.
