Sarah Stewart JohnsonReviews

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 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.½

I loved this book. I had no idea what to expect. The bright, colorful dust jacket and the title drew me in. If I'd known more about it I might never have read it. It was so well written. I could feel the passion that Sarah Stewart Johnson had for Mars and I started to feel it myself because of her prose. She's a wonderful story teller especially for a very difficult topic. She made the scientific jargon very understandable. She has had a dramatic life, but she's very down to earth and likable. I hope she writes more in the future. I would love to read more of her work. It's just amazing.

DNF at about 75%.

The history of Mars exploration is reasonably good if sometimes workmanlike. But the interwoven autobiographical elements were never engaging. Stewart seems to have followed a fairly predictable path in her planetary science career — obsessed with the sky and rocks in childhood, scholarship student, hustling from day one at college for time with the big dogs in the field. Her attempts at literary prose are lacklustre when not eye-rolling (the passage about ferns on top of a volcano is a prime example). Where she completely lost me was her description of falling in love with her husband/soulmate, an aspiring human rights lawyer every bit as blessed as she is. Bleurgh.

After reading John Miller's review on WSJ, I decided this was a must-read for me since I love interplanetary science and find Mars particularly fascinating, following each rover/mission in great detail. (My personal opinion is that we won't find life on Mars (or anywhere else in this galaxy), but I'm not against spending money on these missions and research for no other reason than all the other things we do find and discover.)

Johnson's book is a great romp through her life, her education and a great high-level travel through the last few hundred years of our collective fascination with this red planet. From peering at it with our unaided eyes here at ground level to the latest missions that were launched only this summer (2020), it's clear that our interest in this celestial neighbor of ours won't be abating anytime soon.

I get the sense that Johnson is one of these scientists who are firmly convinced that life is still present on Mars or, if it's become extinct, the evidence of its existence may yet be found. The reason we haven't found it yet is, well, because we haven't found it yet. It's entirely true that we haven't scoured the entire surface yet or investigated all the geological strata. But the high effort remaining doesn't diminish Johnson's enthusiasm for the task, despite being doused with cold water on multiple occasions.

Some of the better quotes:

Upon seeing the [Mariner 4] pictures, Lyndon Johnson sighed, "It may be—it may just be—that life as we know it . . . is more unique than many have thought.

The extreme aridity, the extreme cold, the extremely low atmospheric pressure all raised serious doubts about how life could survive on Mars, and suddenly it seemed like they might be wasting their time. Until the exobiologists could articulate a theory for survival in such an inhospitable place, their hard work would look like a fool's errand.

"It may be that we don't understand Mars at all," wrote the mission's project manager. . . .

[Carl Sagan] conceded that "the evidence for life on Mars is not yet extraordinary enough." (This is in reference to the ALH84001 meteorite that supposedly contained fossil remains.)

At times, her quest seems almost religious:

[Maria Zuber's] rendering [of Mars] had thrown the planet into exquisite relief, flinging two dimensions into three. Meridians arced down from the pole, like strips of lead across the colorful sphere. In that darkened room, it shone to me like a church window.

And Johnson writes quite eloquently:

As I entered the gates of JPL, I felt like Nikos Kazantzakis, the giant of Greek literature, arriving at the wild and holy monasteries of Mount Athos. I walked beneath the olive and oak trees, then into the dark and hallowed halls. . . . It felt holy to be in those rooms, committed more fully to the mission than I'd ever been committed to anything.

And lastly,

I think about this [Euclid's Elements] often when I think about the search for life—what we know and what we can trust, what we believe and why we believe it.

Have we found life on Mars? No. Will we? I doubt it, but that won't stop us from continuing to search for it. Indeed, it's true that there has been insufficient investigation to prove that the absence or presence of life is either true or false. So Johnson and others keep looking and this book is a great tour through the efforts so far.

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 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.

I've read a few books on Mars exploration, so this was somewhat familiar territory, but I found the author's deeply personal perspective to be very illuminating and pertinent to the subject at hand. Also, the writing was quite fine.

I have recently read a number of science books by women scientist. They each have their strengths and weakness but The Siren of Mars is the best of the lot is one is interested in the science of searching for life on the planet of Mars. The book contains 80 pages of notes that are as interesting as the book itself. She also provides some details of er personnel life; however it does not dominate the book itself. In many ways she was lucky that she had supportive parents and understanding professors. This does not mean that she did not face hurdles to the advancement of her career, because she did; however, in her mind she was able to overcome them and was able to become a successful scientist. Just keep moving forward. Definitely a must read book.

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 bit, and speculation begins to be supplanted little by little by evidence.½

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 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.

A stroll round the investigation of the planet Mars from the early years of optics to the latest Mars rovers, interspersed with sections on the author's life and work. I found it a bit scattergun but quite interesting.

I usually love science memoirs. Not this one. Johnson aggressively does not provide any information, preferring flowery language to actual science. (The notes at the end are great, but should have been integrated into the text!) After reviewing the history of Mars studies, just when Johnson starts to get to her own science, she stops. She talks about her falling in love, her child. No more science. I'm not sure what her current role is. Is she even still working on Mars? At the very end, the book really goes off the rails; she starts rephrasing Wikipedia articles on ancient Egypt, then about her high-school geometry classes. I wanted more details, both on the science and on the scientists.

> "Craters? Why didn't we think of craters?" Isaac Asimov, upon seeing the Mariner 4 images, reportedly asked a friend. The possibilities for the planet had disintegrated, our wild imaginings abraded to nothing. Humanity had spent centuries envisioning Mars as similar to the Earth, but Mars was bombarded, blighted, empty. On July 30, The New York Times declared, dispiritedly, what those at the press conference had struggled to say for themselves: Mars was probably "a dead planet."

> Things continued to unravel. The same year, the celebrated British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, who independently conceived of the theory of natural selection, launched an attack on the concept based on his own research, arguing that Mars was likely too cold for liquid water and that a planetwide irrigation system was an absurdity. In 1909, the Greco-French astronomer Eugène Antoniadi, a longtime supporter of Lowell, published a map of Mars without any canals, practically the first such depiction in twenty-five years.

> Mariner 9 would circle Mars, waiting, hoping that the skies would clear and the planet would gradually come back into focus. The Soviets, however, didn't have the same luxury, as their software was not reprogrammable. Their two orbiters, arriving just two weeks after Mariner 9, both snapped their pictures immediately, returning images of nothing more than impenetrable dust clouds.