Good reviews for Cosmic Impact

Sky at Night Cosmic Impact review

As you can see from the above picture, the current issue of the BBC’s Sky at Night magazine includes a review of my book Cosmic Impact. It’s a really nice review, too, by Katrin Raynor-Evans – who says, among other positive things: “The text is superb … It is informative and clear, and May manages to encapsulate everything you need to know about the potential risk to our planet and species.” She gives it four stars out of five.

Cosmic Impact also gets four stars from Brian Clegg, at his Popular Science  book review site. Again the review has lots of positive comments, including the following:

This short book is ideal to get a good overview of the subject without having to delve into too much technical detail – and May makes it approachable by giving the subject context from the many science fiction and popular culture scenarios … where something hits the Earth from outer space.

Finally, although I haven’t seen it myself, I’m told I got a very brief but favourable mention in New Scientist, in the issue dated 2 February 2019. It’s in the “Don’t Miss” column, under the subheading “Read”. After recommending the Penguin Book of Outer Space Exploration to “armchair adventurers” they go on to say:

But if hiding under the sofa is more your style, try Cosmic Impact: Understanding the Threat to Earth from Asteroids and Comets by Andrew May.

If you want to do just that, you can find it in any good bookstore or via the following Amazon links:

Postscript 10 May 2019

Another excellent review in the May issue of How It Works magazine – this time with a five-star rating:

How It Works Cosmic Impact review

Three stars from the BBC

Sky at Night magazine August 2017I don’t often buy the BBC’s Sky at Night magazine, chiefly because of its ridiculously high cover price (more on which later). I do, however, regularly exercise my democratic right to browse through its contents in W. H. Smith’s. So I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the latest issue contains a prominently placed review of my book Destination Mars. I was less happy that the reviewer only gave it 3 out of 5 stars, but it was enough to prompt me to buy the magazine anyway.

Actually it’s not a bad review. The reviewer (who works for the European Space Agency, and hence presumably knows a lot more about the subject than I do) doesn’t make any really negative points – it’s more like one of my school reports that always seemed to say “could do better”. The three-star rating is defined as “average” – which I guess means 50% of all the books ever written are better than mine and 50% are worse. So I can’t really complain (though I like four star reviews better).

In any case, there’s no such thing as bad publicity. This is only the second time anything of mine has been reviewed in print, following the review in Fortean Times earlier this year. And the Sky at Night magazine has almost 10,000 more readers than FT (source).

There’s another point I ought to bring to your attention. The BBC magazine costs £5.20 per issue, which strikes me as extortionately high for something that only has 100 pages and is packed with advertisements. My book has 160 pages (and the only advertisement is for another book in the same series), yet its cover price is only £7.99. If you follow this link to its Amazon page, you’ll find that some sellers have it even cheaper than that.