Yervant Terzian (1939–2019)

A collection of essays originally presented as speeches at a symposium held in honor of Carl Sagan's 60th birthday in 1994 and published in book form in 1997, the year after his death. They're divided up into three sections, reflecting the main areas of Sagan's interest: "Planetary Exploration", "Life in the Cosmos", "Science Education" and "Science, Environment, and Public Policy."

Some of these essays are much better than others. All of them are pretty short, so there's not necessarily room to treat the broader subjects in more than a fairly superficial way. And, of course, many of them are now very dated. However, the first two sections do at least give a decent overview of the state of planetary exploration and the SETI program in the mid-90s, and there are a few interestingly provocative opinions in the second half. Given the nature of the event they were written for, they all feel the need to pause in order to heap words of praise on Sagan's head, which gets a little tiring after a while, but I can't begrudge it. Heck, I'm willing to heap a few words of praise on him, myself; I freely admit that if it weren't for Cosmos I very likely would not be where I am today.… (more)