Book Review : This One’s Too Light on Its Feat

The Beauty of Light by Ben Bova (John Wiley & Sons: $24.95; 343 pages, illustrated

The easiest books to review are the ones you either like or dislike. The hardest are the ones that don’t make much of an impression one way or the other, such as “The Beauty of Light” by Ben Bova.

This is a book that purports to tell us everything we ever wanted to know about light, and then some. “Let there be light!” the book begins (not a bad beginning), and then proceeds to explain how important light is in our sciences and in our imaginations and how much we stress light in virtually everything we do.

Vision is our most vital and our most acute sense, Bova tells us. It is the hardest of the senses to do without. Our language acknowledges the value we place on sight. “To be a person of vision is a good thing,” Bova writes, “while someone who pushes ahead blindly does not usually win our approval.”

Avalanche of Topics

In this breezy manner, Bova covers an avalanche of topics, which some may find enlightening, but which left me shrugging my shoulders. So what? I wondered.

The book is oceans wide but inches deep. It’s a compilation of lots of disparate, mildly entertaining facts strung together more or less around the central theme of light, which is a pretty flimsy theme, all things considered.

Bova doesn’t deny this. On the first page of the foreword he puts his cards on the table: “This book touches on hundreds of topics--lightly. What I have tried to do is to simply sit down and chat with you, to tell you about all the fascinating, surprising, and wonderful things that we do with light and that light does for us. This is by no means a textbook. It does not pretend to offer the complete or definitive story on any of the topics it discusses. It is meant merely to inform you, perhaps to delight you, and to intrigue you enough so that you will understand and appreciate the wonders that strike your eye every day.”

He’s certainly true to his word. The book is just what he says it is, which for me is not good enough. I want to read something deeper, some interpretation, an argument, a new way of seeing things. I want an author to share his thinking process with me. I want him to massage ideas, not just pile up facts.

Not a Bad Book

Forgive me for sounding harsh. I don’t mean to. It’s not a bad book. In some ways it’s even engaging. You are sure to learn things from it that you didn’t know and perhaps would like to know. For one thing, Bova reports, it turns out that reading a lot does ruin your eyes (just as our mothers warned us).

To give the book its due: here you will find out about the evolution of the universe and the evolution of life; artificial and natural light and their effects on people; the work of Galileo, Newton and Einstein (among many others); art and literature; lasers and holograms, and a zillion other things. Some readers may find this just their cup of tea, and if so, they should rush right out and get a copy of this book.

Bova, the author of many science-fiction novels and nonfiction books, writes in an easy, fluid style. He does a good job of explaining things, providing just enough detail to make his points but not so much that the reader gets lost.

But I kept waiting for the conclusion, and I never did come across one worthy of the name. It seems a shame for Bova to have gathered this information and set it down without at least having wondered what the point of it all is. If he did wonder about that, he gives no indication that he did or what answers he came up with.