Sarah Stewart Johnson

The Publisher Says: Mars was once similar to Earth, but today there are no rivers, no lakes, no oceans. Coated in red dust, the terrain is bewilderingly empty. And yet multiple spacecraft are circling Mars, sweeping over Terra Sabaea, Syrtis Major, the dunes of Elysium, and Mare Sirenum—on the brink, perhaps, of a staggering find, one that would inspire humankind as much as any discovery in the history of modern science.

In this beautifully observed, deeply personal book, Georgetown show more scientist Sarah Stewart Johnson tells the story of how she and other researchers have scoured Mars for signs of life, transforming the planet from a distant point of light into a world of its own.

Johnson’s fascination with Mars began as a child in Kentucky, turning over rocks with her father and looking at planets in the night sky. She now conducts fieldwork in some of Earth’s most hostile environments, such as the Dry Valleys of Antarctica and the salt flats of Western Australia, developing methods for detecting life on other worlds. Here, with poetic precision, she interlaces her own personal journey—as a female scientist and a mother—with tales of other seekers, from Percival Lowell, who was convinced that a utopian society existed on Mars, to Audouin Dollfus, who tried to carry out astronomical observations from a stratospheric balloon. In the process, she shows how the story of Mars is also a story about Earth: This other world has been our mirror, our foil, a telltale reflection of our own anxieties and yearnings.

Empathetic and evocative, The Sirens of Mars offers an unlikely natural history of a place where no human has ever set foot, while providing a vivid portrait of our quest to defy our isolation in the cosmos.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Women in STEM fields are still outnumbered by men. I like reading about them because it gives me a hopeful feeling about the pace of change in our world. Once upon a time, Vera Rubin and Lise Mitner and Henrietta Swan Leavitt were just...not talked about, invisible in our public discourse about Science. Now, there are books and movies about the women who have always practiced in the STEM fields like Hidden Figures to educate us on this erased history.

About time, too.

What that doesn't do is tell us anything about the women actively working in the STEM fields, about their motivations and curiosities, their ideas about what the field they're working within is and should be doing. This book's main appeal to me, then, was to tell me about a woman's journey to, and progress within, planetary science—a field I find endlessly fascinating.

I get the whole enchilada here, the story of why the author became a planetary scientist...spoiler alert, the centuries-long Romance of it all had a lot to do with it...as well as her own précis of the state of modern research into the past and present of our neighbor. The reasons we should care about Mars and its past aren't stinted, either.

What I enjoyed most, I think, was her palpable pleasure and excitement as she tells us about the atmosphere of tension and the sense of relief in Mission Control as probes and rovers are launched toward and land on Mars. The description then weaves in the results, the science, that is the reason for all this highly educated and trained labor focusing on this place. Her narrative voice never descends into gee-whizzery. She is definitely writing out of passion and fascination but doesn't become a total fangirl squeeing her way around the world she is privileged to inhabit.

Since that's exactly what I'd do, I was impressed by this restraint. Of course, her long training in the field does instill a certain sense of remove from the raw passion of the fan. It's taken her a lifetime of learning to get to where she is. It wasn't, and isn't, easy to fully dedicate yourself to a passion. The compromises made are always hard...being away from family, the strains on one's marriage...and she deals with all those honestly.

An extensive Notes section offers the non-scientist a roadmap for further reading and discovery. As this is a personal story, a memoir of a woman who chose to serve her passion for science, it isn't a read I judge by how well-sourced her information is. I just went along with this intelligent, erudite guide as I visited the world of a practicing planetary scientist.

You should, too, whatever your sex or gender. Also a good last-minute ebook to gift to your high-school aged girl giftee as a proof that aspirations are very much achievable. show less

I've long been interested in books about Mars and space exploration in general. I saw a favorable review of this book in New Scientist magazine but probably would have picked it up anyway.

The author starts by reviewing early exploration of Mars, of course, through telescopes. Although I knew about people like Schiaparelli and Lowell whose early work popularized the idea of canals on Mars, I had never given much though about the size of the images they were looking at. They were drawing show more detailed maps of Mars from images that were maybe half a centimeter across!

Johnson also gives a good review of the various space craft visiting Mars, from craft that vanished because the programming confused English and metric systems, to landers which roved around giving excellent data. These space craft changed our view of Mars in the pre-visit days of a planet with water and possibly life, to the extremely arid, dust storm ridden and crater filled planet we know today.

She also does a good job, mostly, of bringing her own personal growth, from a farm girl in TN to a world renowned planetary scientist. She also highlights several other women in the space program, some of which were her own mentors. Inspiring stuff. Fits in nicely with "Rise of the Rocket Girls" and "Hidden Figures".

My main complaint about the book is it's lack of illustrations. A couple of maps and some photos of rovers would have made the book much more alive. Especially a map which showed the relative locations of the landers.

My other, and more minor complaint, is her timeline. She jumps around a lot, which is OK, but I got confused a few times when trying to relate one event to another. Especially with regards to her own story. A couple of dates thrown in would have helped. show less

Sarah Stewart Johnson mixes memoir with a history of man's exploration of Mars in this well told narrative. She is a planetary scientist who has worked with NASA on missions to Mars, and is also a professor at Georgetown. In the book, she touches on her own life sparingly, giving us enough about herself to understand how her love of geology and geochemistry led her to NASA. Bits of her story are sprinkled throughout the book. But it's when she is laying out the story of the hunt for life on show more Mars that the book really soars. Her prose is really very good - verging on the poetic - and draws you in.

Johnson tells this story chronologically, starting with early NASA missions, though she does take some side trips back to the later years of the 19th century (and in some cases earlier earlier) for an understanding of how we humans have perceived our closest neighbor and it's potential for life. In these side trips she lays out how Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli first mapped Mars in the 1870s, and included seas, continents and canals, based on his observations from Earth. The thought that Mars had intelligent life who built canals later inspired Percival Lowell, who studied Mars intensively, and began large telescope construction to more clearly see Mars in the early twentieth century.

Meanwhile, the main thread of the book takes us through the major NASA missions to Mars from the Mariner flights in the 1970s through Pathfinder and Sojourner up to the rovers of the 21st century. She even mentions (in anticipation) the rover Perseverance and its helicopter companion Ingenuity - the book was published just before they landed on Mars. One thing I did not know, or had forgotten, was the role Carl Sagan played on the early Mars missions and his involvement in the initial experiments that tried to determine if the building blocks for life (or life itself) existed on Mars.

Overall, this is a short but pretty ambitious book taking on mankind's fascination with the Red Planet and our search for evidence of life there, and I believe it mostly succeeds in it's ambitions. Well worth a read for anyone interested in science history, or interplanetary exploration or the search for life in the universe. I rate The Sirens of Mars Four Stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐.

NOTE: I did the audiobook version of this book, narrated by Cassandra Campbell. Campbell is an actress and prolific book narrator who did her usual fantastic job. She also narrated The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which I reviewed in January. show less

An unusual book, a mixture of science history and the author’s personal journey both professional and personal. She conveys her own sense of wonder throughout, even when she’s describing quaint early theories of a superior civilization having constructed Martian canals, or attempts to listen to Martian radio signals by ascending in balloons. The book gains traction though when the first missions start to reach Mars, as crude images are painstakingly transmitted back from orbiters bit by show more bit, and speculation begins to be supplanted little by little by evidence. show less