[A] romp ... Baron skillfully builds tension around the house of cards Lowell creates. How and when everything will come tumbling down is a powerful narrative driver ... Baron meticulously pieces all of this together ... Prepare to be dazzled.
Engrossing ... Baron seasons his narrative with striking details ... Until we learn more from future missions, his highly enjoyable book makes a strong case for the proposition that brainy Martians exist only in the imagination of Earthlings.
Briskly written ... A few sections feel padded by an author who wants to boost his word count; Mr. Baron also is eager to signal his virtue by describing and condemning the racism of yore. For the most part, though, his book is a compelling chronicle of a man whose legacy as an astronomer is tarnished by wishful thinking ... It is also oddly stirring.
Twinkling ... Readers will be delighted to make fresh acquaintance with David and Mabel Todd, an eclipse-chasing, balloon-launching couple sexily enmeshed with Emily Dickinson’s family ... Leaning heavily on a fat pile of periodicals, The Martians extracts many precious little deets from this brief and breathless era ... But serious questions, still relevant, undergird the folly.
Terrific ... A fascinating tale that’s beautifully told; Baron is a lucid and elegant writer. The book is also rich with illustrations of primary sources, from newspaper articles to astronomers’ sketches, that bring the story to life.
Baron hits the right tone in The Martians for this kind of tale. Lightly mocking without being denunciatory, he appears very familiar with and not overly worried about his country’s habit of occasionally getting all too worked up about things.
Entertaining ... It’s a lively story that will be entirely new to most modern readers, though, like many a chapter in this country’s history, it’s a typically American tale of industriousness and can-do spirit that ultimately runs aground on flimflam, bunkum, bosh, and hooey ... Baron is a clear, rigorous storyteller who, perhaps because he has spent so much time immersed in 19th-century clippings, occasionally lapses into waxed-mustache prose ... But I am grateful that he has disinterred this peculiarly American story.
Baron tells a compelling story in which mankind’s greatest power, compelling storytelling, unleashes a tenuous scientific observation that drives premature speculation, and a thin veneer of logic spawns runaway flights of fancy ... Baron captures the milieu spanning the ends of the Victorian and Edwardian eras without jeering at their lack of modern sensibilities. He leaves most opportunities for media criticism or parallels to today’s conspiracy theories to the reader, and judges Lowell gently by focusing on the many researchers and writers his works inspired.
The Martians, David Baron’s riveting exploration of the Mars craze of the late 1800s and early 1900s, is a case study in the formation of unfounded beliefs ... Baron is a terrific storyteller, and he has a sensational story to tell, replete with a host of memorable characters (and more than a few romances).
A blow-by-blow history of Americans’ obsession with Mars and Martians ... These folks didn’t want scientific proof; just a great story. In The Martians, David Bacon has given us another one.
Baron personally visited historic sites connected to Mars coverage, providing a present-day connection to past enthusiasm. A captivating look at an astronomical obsession.
Briskly entertaining social history ... Especially vivid and colorful in Baron’s hands; his storytelling skills and astute research instincts drive the tale relentlessly.
It is not easy to make a pretentious blowhard wastrel like Lowell a sympathetic figure, but David Baron manages it admirably in The Martians, his convivial and rigorously researched history of the first Martian craze.
For all of its odd fads and weird crazes, its eccentric characters boldly making completely audacious claims with their full chests, Baron’s The Martians doesn’t feel as remote as you might expect. Privileged white men are still dreaming of Mars as the next frontier to conquer. An overwhelmed, exhausted populace still seeks sensationalist headlines in bold 32-point font instead of boring news that delivers hard truths. People are still seeking to fill the God-shaped hole of Nietzsche’s obituary for the deity with pretty much anything they can get their hands on. These aspects make it the perfect time to read Baron’s meticulously researched chronicle of a time of unbridled optimism and relentless disorientation — no matter how different the world might look.
