COSMOS: Possible Worlds. Ann Druyan. The sequel to Carl Sagan’s classic, this is also the companion book to the thirteen-part 2020 season of the television series of the same name. Yet it is a stand-alone book in Druyan’s own insightful and poetic voice, allowing her to expand on the personal stories of too-little-known historical figures in science who shaped our understanding of the world. It is also about how hard (yet productive) true scientific thinking can be. Druyan, who collaborated with Sagan on the first Cosmos series, shares his visual and inspiring powers of description, sense of awe, and innate blend of wonder and skepticism. “Science, like love, is a means to … transcendence, to that soaring experience of oneness in feeling fully alive,” she writes. “Through these stories I have come to feel more intensely the romance of science and the wonder of being alive right now.” Beautifully illustrated with color artwork and photos. National Geographic, 2020, 383 pp., $30.00.
THE MOUND BUILDER MYTH: Fake History and the Hunt for a ‘Lost White Race.’ Jason Colavito. Colavito, a blogger and author of several books, including The Cult of Alien Gods: H.P. Lovecraft and Extraterrestrial Pop Culture, examines how Native American burial mounds across the United States have been systematically recast as having been built by a lost white race of “true” native Americans. Through impressive historical scholarship (documented in extensive endnotes and references), Colavito describes the ample evidence (gathered by Thomas Jefferson, among others) that the mounds were built by Native Americans but later co-opted by others with a racist agenda. He connects archaeological frauds such as the Cardiff Giant and works by H.P. Lovecraft to more recent religious and white supremacist efforts to fabricate and perpetuate a false history and pseudo-archaeology that robs Native Americans of their heritage. University of Oklahoma Press, 2020, 402 pp., $24.95.