Year Of The Comets: A Journey from Sadness to the Stars

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On the clearest nights in the darkest places you can see as many as two thousand stars. On what scaffolding are they hung Jan DeBlieu began to wonder. Her husband had become enveloped in a depression of his own, and both he and DeBlieu were struggling to find points of light out of that darkness. DeBlieu discovers it in the sky above, a firmament of order and beauty that prompts her to consider the worlds inside our minds, the delicate framework of neurons and synapses that support our fragile selves. Year of the Comets is her record of the journey she and her husband take from pain to healing.

Reviews

"As in her previous book, Wind, DeBlieu uses forces of nature to illuminate the human condition. Here she brackets the harrowing story of her husband's severe depression with the appearances of the comets Hyakutake and Hale-Bopp; in between these astronomical events, she reflects on the chaos and order of the cosmos by weaving a well-paced history of stargazing."
"Books about black holes and galaxies abound. Much rarer are books that show how the cosmos touches our innermost lives. By interweaving her family's struggles with exceptionally lucid ruminations on stargazing and astrophysics, Jan DeBlieu makes plain what many stargazers no doubt feel but dare not say--that looking skyward at night satisfies a deep need to escape the trials of the day."
"DeBlieu, an award-winning natural-history writer, skillfully folds the scientific information she has had to master--neurological as well as astronomical--into a memoir of toughing out hard times with help from the heavens."
"DeBlieu's... work brings [her] routinely to the edge of wonder--to space and infinity, in DeBlieu's central metaphor--and therefore to great depths of emotion."
"A poetic compendium of wind phenomenon and a hymn of praise for these towering movements of the air."

Author Bio

Jan DeBlieu, a recipient of the John Burroughs Medal for Wind, contributes frequently to Audubon, the New York Times Magazine, and Orion. The Cape Hatteras Coastkeeper for the North Carolina Coastal Federation, she is also the author of Hatteras Journal and Meant to be Wild, chosen by the Library Journal as one of 1992's best science books of the year.