r With Love, from.. LT Cover Story Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner READING BUG *Tr our new Bread-less low-carb Sandwiches Great Homemade Soups! Daily Specials • Homemade Soups • Carryout • Deli Trays • Catering OPEN 7 DAYS - Mon.-Sat. 10-9 • Sunday 10-3 248-926-9SSS 3 0 % 3426 E.West Maple @ Haggerty but it offers much, much more. As . a. planetary scientist and an adviser to NASA on space exploration, Grinspoon is a believer in life elsewhere. He's a hampion for exploring our solar sys- tem, and heading for the stars to look for life. The nighttime sky has always beck- oned, and Grinspoon introduces us to some of the scientists who spent their time looking up. Among them were Copernicus, who crushed the view of an arth-centered universe; Kepler, who .s; corked out the mathematical laws of planetary motion; and Galileo, whose Observations of Jupiter's moons provided hard evidence that the Earth was far from the center of everything. 'By the late 19th-century, American astronomer Percival Lowell had the world transfixed on "canals" on Mars — the creation of some faraway civilization, peOle believed. In Part II, Grinspoon takes us on a thrilling ride through the history of, well; everything: the Big Bang; the lives of stars and the birth of planets; a molten, hostile Earth and the evolution of an ormosphere, oceans and life. Planetary science is now an interdiscipli- nary field requiring knowledge of cos- mology,astronomy, physics, geology, atmospheric sciences and molecular biol- ogy. With metaphor, analogy and clear, entertaining writing, Grinspoon carries us through eons of Earth history to help us understand' how we got here: If we're going to think about life beyond Earth, we should know something about the only other example we know of Yet our Earthly pei:-pective, Grinspoon writes, can De limiting; our assumptions about what rakes life, and what it needs to survive, maybe incom- plete. A visit to Jupiter's moon, Europa, by way of the aptly named spacecraft Galileo in the .1990s, showed a fractured, shifting shell of fresh-water ice, beneath which scientists suspect lies a vast ocean - that may harbor life. How does that ocean, so far from the sun, keep from freezing? The source of energy that generates heat appears to be the tidal forces of gravity exerted by Jupiter, the massive planet that Europa orbits — so life may not depend so entirely on a sun, after all. Within the next decade or two, scientists hope to send probes back to Europa to find out for sure. In the meantime, other scientists are listening for signs of life by training radio telescopes on the stars. Grinspoon describes the ambitious (detractors call it fanciful) program called SETT: the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. If ' FAMILY DINING 22921 NORTHWESTERN HWY. [Corner of 12 Mile Rd.) Southfield OFF ANY ENTREE * OF ANOTHER ENTREE EQUAL OR GREATER VALUE MON. THROUGH THURS. AFTER 3 P.M. 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The author comes back to this idea when he writes about the continuing interest in UFOs, even an obsession in recent years with a rock formation on Mars that looks like a face. Grinspoon may not believe in all those things, but he remains a dreamer — if always a scien- tist first. "What do I really believe?" he writes at the end of this terrific book. "I think our galaxy is frill of species who have crawled up from the slime of their home worlds, evolved self-awareness and start- ed to tinker, passed beyond the threat of technological self-extermination, and transcended their animal origins to move out into the cosmos." Won't it be wonderful if time will tell? — Bruce Lieberman Copley News Service SCATTERED AMONG THE PEOPLES TTI, T: .13iONG TM, PFC)PLES By Allan Levine (Overlook Press; 480 pp.; $35) B eginning with the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492 and concluding with the plight of the Jews in the Soviet Union until 1986, Allan Levine has scanned Jewish history, focusing on places and people. In Scattered Among the Peoples, he selected 12 cities and periods: Seville, 1492; Venice, 151 6; Constantinople, 1666; Amsterdam, 1700; Vienna, 1730; Ftaiikicart, 1.848.:. Sr. Petersburg, 1881; Paris, 1895; New York, '15'1.3; :Berlin, 1925; Vilna, 1944; and Kiev, 1967: For each of these, he identifies impot, tant Jewish individuals who left their imprint on Jewish history. By telling their stories, Levine provides a unique approach to understanding what hap- pened to Diaspora Jewry during these past 500 years. He begins by tracing the movement of the Abravenel family from Spain to Portugal to Italy to Turkey, bringing to life what happened to Spanish Jews as they survived persecution, expulsion and ghettoization. The development of the Dutch Jewish community during the 18th century is told through examining the lives of Abraham Pereira and his family. A .