This book is about the year science changed, which happens to be 1957. This might seem to be a controversial choice for the day the universe changed what with 1905 and 1543 and 1054, but the topic here is the International Geophysical Year, a multi-nation project of scientific collaboration. The event was a spin off of, and inclusive in, the International Polar Years (1882 and 1923).

The project was about research that either required a global effort or had transparent global consequence. The project included a public education aspect to it, and the outreach to schools in particular is cited as an inspiration for a lot of modern working scientists. Notable results of the research include the discovery of the Van Allen Belts, the conclusive proof of plate tectonics, and early confirmation of anthropogenic global warming. Those are only the hits that charted, though, and there was plenty of important but non-conclusive work.

The year marked a high point of international collaboration towards a goal, all the more impressive for taking place in the middle of the Cold War. There were only two hiccups: the ongoing dispute between China and Taiwan to cause China to leave the project (albeit with some research continuing in an unoffical manner) and Russia's launch of Sputnik. The satellite was part of the plan in the abstract, but the U.S.S.R.'s closed books (at first) about it was looked at as not in the spirit of the project.

The most enduring legacy, other than who it inspired, was the Antarctic Treaty. The story here puts the descriptions in A City on Mars on notice. That book treated it as if it was some sort of dust sprinkled by the Peace Fairy. It is a lot more thoughtful and intentional, and more importantly, has worked.

The book consists of chapters on each of the areas of scientific focus, joined by the author's interviews of scientists with some relation to the project, direct or indirect. The writing style is...quirky. The text is conversational, with the author not only injecting thoughts but process into the text. To describe it, I ought to hate it, but I do not. I think that it works because it glues the two, or three, different styles of chapters together. The takeaway is that this is not a traditional history.

The two complaints that I have are how the author talks that first hiccup in the collaborative spirit and what amounts to the aforementioned third style of chapter. First the treatment of the issue between China and Taiwan in the same casual style comes off as flippant. Bearing in mind this is taking less than a decade after the PRC's victory, it reads like the author has no understanding of the facts of the situation.

Second, the third style of chapter that gets sneaked in is a omnibus summary about all the research done in the particular topic the chapter covers. Reader, my attention waned. Outside of the facts as presented here coming off as if the U.S. was doing all the work, there is a lot of '...and science happened, leading to further science.' It is wrong to focus on big discoveries as the work of science when science is mostly the opposite. But this is not a curative position, and either needs more or less.

Reading a book like this today feels like an act of defiance with an amuse-bouche of hopelessness. Do not, under any circumstances, mention the Antarctic Treaty to anyone affiliated with the current administration of the U.S. There are a mentions of more current controversy and general anti-science thinking, but the text here is in the camp of people who think that science will save the the world, and that science communication will create the conditions towards international peace, and have the receipts of it doing so in terms of the International Geophysical Year doing so. It it hard to read because of that, a "beautiful sunset at noon", the poetry of Wilfred Owen or more pointedly the science fiction of William Hope Hodgson, where all the opinions expressed here already feel dated. It feels hard. It also feels important.

My thanks to the author, Mark O'Connell, for writing the book, and to the publisher, Prometheus, for making the ARC available to me.