David Baron

With this suspenseful narrative history (Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air), award-winning science writer David Baron tells the story of the enterprising scientists—among them, planet hunter James Craig Watson, pioneering astronomer Maria Mitchell, and ambitious young inventor Thomas Edison—who raced to Wyoming and Colorado in the summer of 1878, at the dawn of the Gilded Age, to observe the first great...

The Times headline was no joke. In the early 1900s, many Americans actually believed that we had discovered intelligent life on Mars. The Martians is a truly bizarre tale reconstructed through newly discovered clippings, letters, and photographs by bestselling science writer David Baron. It begins in the 1890s with Percival Lowell, a wealthy Harvard scion who was so certain of...