Nonfiction review: The Fallen Sky

NONFICTION
Chicken Little kind of had it right -- the sky is falling, in fireballs and chunks of rock hewn by a tumble through Earth's atmosphere.

Christopher Cokinos hunts down these meteorites from backyards to Australia's Outback to museum exhibits in "The Fallen Sky: An Intimate History of Shooting Stars."

With the help of a glossary, Cokinos breaks down the science of meteorites -- their origins, what throws them our way and what's inside them. It's "an intimate history," he writes, because the stardust that formed meteorites is present in everything: a lawyer, apples, Jupiter, a mouth, an asteroid containing enough gold to make 2 billion wedding bands.

"The Fallen Sky" is no textbook, however. It highlights notable meteorites, but the book primarily focuses on the people who scour fields for the space rocks.

One modern meteorite dealer begs Cokinos not to portray his fellow enthusiasts as eccentrics and, acknowledging that as a birder he knows something about quirky hobbies, he doesn't. He could have, with this cast of characters: a fame-seeking polar explorer, a mining engineer who popularized the idea that craters could be caused by meteors, a biology professor who opened the first meteorite museum, a Kansas farming family whose land seemed like a magnet for meteorites, an Oregon immigrant who managed to steal a 15-ton meteorite.

They're not lab-coated scientists in sterile, theoretical environments. Through Cokinos' sympathetic eyes, they're ordinary people picking up extraordinary objects. Some shattered and left pieces of themselves strewn across continents. Others remained steady as, well, rocks.

The book is also part travelogue and memoir. Cokinos' growing obsession with meteorites and the stories that surround them -- biographies of their finders, chapters of Earth's history -- takes him from pole to pole. He tags along on a bird-tagging expedition in Greenland to tread the dents left by the "ghost rocks" explorer Robert Peary stripped from the land he was trying to conquer. In Antarctica, he finally hunts meteorites himself, scanning the blinding white snowscape for small, dark bits from space.

Cokinos' journeys take place during an affair, the subsequent divorce and the beginning of a new relationship. He took up stargazing as a balm. The brief references to his tumultuous personal life jar the book's narrative flow until he joins the Antarctica expedition. There, he can physically pick through the pieces, looking for meaning and beauty in the remnants of something larger.

He writes that "in transcribing and translating some annals of the fallen sky, I could believe my own life added up to a story, to something more than just being here and being gone."

It's unsettling how passive Cokinos becomes, though, in memoir-mode, a birder sitting quietly watching as the sky falls. The collisions, personal and extraterrestrial, are things that befall him. He isn't chasing shooting stars so much as he is admiring their glitter and bracing himself for the next one that drops into his path.