Making Contact

I hadn't known that the main character in Carl Sagan's Contact was based on a real person until my mother-in-law gave me this book for my birthday. It's a biography of Dr. Jill Tater, inspiration for Ellie Arroway, who as devoted almost her entire life to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. As such, it's also a history of that field of study.

The subject matter is interesting, especially when it comes to the financial struggles, under-the-table deals and slapped together technology that are more apparent in SETI than any other field of science. And Dr. Tarter is certainly an interesting woman. But I had a hard time with this book. Mostly because I still can't figure out how the author meant to organize it. There was probably a method to her madness, but I found the book jumped around too much for me to really follow the thread of Dr. Tarter's life. Her second husband is mentioned two chapters before her divorce, in a way that makes it seem like her husband merely changed his name.

All in all, I think you're better off reading Contact. For all that it's fictional, it's both more interesting and more informative than this book which won't hold up five years from now (a reference to the dress being white and gold or black and blue dates it faster than technology dates TV shows). But it was at least nice to get a biography of a pioneering woman in science.

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