Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Sagan's field of expertise was planetary science - a field in which he could write knowledgeably and well. He fell down badly, though, when he expanded his literary endeavours into fields that he was not an expert in, such as biology.
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True enough. Cosmo was a unique book which inspired a lot of people when both it and the PBS series it spawned came out. Of course, back then there were a lot of people in the US who were space crazy from the Apollo program. His other books were not all that great.
One can also point to Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time as a similar sort of book, i.e. an extremely popular science book discussing theory. In a different area, I'm fond of Nicholas Wade's Before the Dawn. Both are books that discuss what were the popular theories of the time, which is my point. They discuss theory rather than decided fact.