SOURCE: “From Nebulae to Noah's Ark,” in Christian Science Monitor, Vol. 82, January 10, 1990, p. 13.

In the following review, Rubin provides a tempered assessment of Barnes's A History of the World in 10[frac12 Chapters.]

“I am on a storm-tossed boat out at sea, the dark waves around me. This was what the earliest men saw in the skies above them—an unfathomable sea upon which they were drifting. Now we, too, talk of a universe filled with waves. We have returned to the first myth. And what if the stars are really torches, held up to light me on my way?”

Gazing up at the night sky from a small observatory in Dorset [in Julian Barnes's A History of the World in 10[frac12] Chapters], astronomer Damian Fall sees galaxies, nebulae, planets, interstellar debris. He also believes he is seeing the same night sky seen by certain prehistoric inhabitants of this...