cover image Henry Norris Russell: Dean of American Astronomers

Henry Norris Russell: Dean of American Astronomers

David H. DeVorkin. Princeton University Press, $72 (528pp) ISBN 978-0-691-04918-2

When Henry Russell died at age 80 in 1957, he had been (among other things) a Princeton professor; an expert on binary stars and solar evolution; the co-creator of the important Hertzsprung-Russell diagram; a columnist (for 43 years) at Scientific American; and ""the first astrophysical theorist in America."" Without a major observatory of his own to manage, Russell coordinated the growing resources of American astronomy, bringing the practical astronomers watching the heavens together with the new physics that told us what they saw. He also became well known outside his field, lecturing on science, the academy and religion. All these activities made him, according to DeVorkin (Science with a Vengeance), ""a transitional figure in the emergence of modern theoretical astrophysics"" whose discoveries and influence extended from the turn of the century to WWII. DeVorkin, curator of the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum, has written an overwhelmingly detailed scholarly biography (the first one) of a fortunate, tightly wound, hardworking scholar and public intellectual. Russell's life involves the history not only of astronomy but of America's patrician classes and its elite universities; the Princeton professor of the 1930s had been ""Our Bright and Shining Star"" to his Princeton classmates of 1897. Adumbrating Russell's personal and professional lives while making a case for the man's achievements, DeVorkin packs in as many details as he can; as a result, the work is (perhaps inevitably) slow moving and sometimes inelegant. Despite the author's carefully nontechnical language, it's hard to imagine his exhaustive work finding a broad audience. But it's easy to see why people in the relevant fields--the history of astronomy and physics; science studies; Princetoniana--will want this very informative volume. 33 b&w illus. (Aug.)