Following the sun and meeting Phaeton’s fate

Apollo’s Fire

A Day on Earth in Nature and Imagination

Michael Sims

Viking: 296 pp., $24.95

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MOZART liked to sleep late. So did Einstein. John Donne, in “The Sun Rising,” remonstrated, “Busy old fool, unruly Sun/Why dost thou thus/ Through windows, and through curtains, call on us?”

Many people, even some who have made important contributions to civilization, have preferred to draw their shutters rather than witness the sunrise. Michael Sims wants to win them back. As he warns in “Apollo’s Fire: A Day on Earth in Nature and Imagination”: “I intend to explore the day from beginning to end, creating what I hope will be an informative and entertaining companion on our shared journey.” Those who find phrases like “our shared journey” somewhat grating may want to roll over and go back to sleep.

Sims’ method is to divide the day into its constituent elements (dawn, morning, noon and so on) and hang on each portion a miscellany of thematically linked gleanings from science, history and literature. Sometimes this approach works nicely. Discussing dusk, for instance, he uses the etymology of the word “twilight” -- “ ‘Twi-’ is a combining form meaning simply ‘two,’ ” thus, a time of “two lights” -- as a way to introduce the bat, a twilight creature whose “dual nature” (a mammal with birdlike qualities, a benign animal that we associate with the diabolical) he illustrates with references to a diverse array of authors, from Aesop to Evan S. Connell.

Similarly, noon becomes an opportunity to retell the story of Eratosthenes, who in the third century BC figured out that he could use the shortness of the noontime shadow as a way to find the circumference of the Earth -- a number he calculated with surprising accuracy. Sunset provides a reminder that the novel “Frankenstein” grew out of a ghost-story contest whose participants were its author, Mary Shelley; her lover and future husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley; and Lord Byron.

Far too often, however, Sims’ conceit is stretched thin, with each chapter becoming a scattering of factoids easily Googled and extruded in overripe rhetoric. We are vouchsafed such stunning revelations as that afternoon is warmer than morning; that “from tropics to poles, the sky’s blue dome is populated with an ever-changing panoply of clouds”; that “early religions assumed that bad weather, like other afflictions, indicated a parental disapproval over some act we had performed or omitted.” When he runs out of such morsels, he resorts to lists: “Inevitably the symbolic value of different times of day shows up in film and television, from ‘The Dawn Patrol’ and ‘High Noon’ to ‘After Dark, My Sweet’ and ‘The Twilight Zone’ and ‘Midnight Cowboy.’ ” Not for nothing did Donne call the sun a “pedantic wretch.”

Sims does not always get things right, either. Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” does not “unfold in a single day,” as Sims has it. I’ve never heard of a “New York second,” although a New York minute might feel like one. During his discussion of night, Sims amusingly asks, “[W]ho were the drunken shepherds who first perceived a bird of paradise in the constellation Apus?” Unfortunately, Apus is a latter-day construct, conjured by Dutch navigators around the turn of the 17th century and not imagined (or even seen) by ancient Greek herders.

Less refutable is Sims’ weakness for florid description. A dog does not merely sniff the ground on his morning walk, he “reads the olfactory bulletin board.” The sun is given to “tantrums.” The movements of the heavens are, inevitably, a “cosmic dance.” Moreover, he anoints nearly every famous name or title with an oleaginous epithet. Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” is “that bottomless well of stirring adventure and delicious writing.” Norton Juster’s “The Phantom Tollbooth” is the “splendidly imaginative children’s book.” Charles Darwin is “that versatile and surprising man”; Edgar Allan Poe is “that starry-eyed haunter of the nighttime”; Hipparchus is “that brilliant noticer”; Leonardo is “our tireless noticer.” Sometimes this tendency produces odd consequences. “Entertaining” is how Sims describes the “quirk of physics” behind the fact that most tornadoes occur in the afternoon -- not terribly entertaining, I would imagine, for those running for shelter as the whirlwind approaches.

As if to throw more unsavory spices into the stew, Sims has decided to refer to the sections of the book as portions of the day. Thus the reader is warned, “This evening we will return to” such-and-such a subject, or “We will address this enigma tonight,” when he means forthcoming chapters; recalling material from a previous chapter brings an “Earlier today.” This device, especially when coupled with the dubious use of the third-person plural, is far too precious.

Throughout it all, Sims weaves a retelling of the story of Phaeton, Apollo’s human offspring, on whom Apollo bestowed the gift of driving the chariot of the sun. Phaeton did such a poor job of this that Zeus had to shoot him down with a lightning bolt. Sims might have thought twice before using this story as an emblem for his book. A repository of the trite and the secondhand, “Apollo’s Fire” is much like Phaeton’s wild ride: an attempt to compass the day that ultimately crashes and burns.

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Jesse Cohen is the series editor of “The Best American Science Writing.”