Baruch Blumberg, director of NASA’s Astrobiology Institute, appears to have
had a misspent youth. He confesses to “hanging out in libraries instead of pool
halls” as a boy. For Blumberg, reading isn’t just a pastime, it’s a passion.
Top of his reading list you’ll find books that put astrobiology into a wider
context, such as Life on Other Worlds by Steven J. Dick (Cambridge,
1998), which recounts tales of extraterrestrial life from classical Greece to
the present.
Blumberg also takes an interest in books set in places familiar to him, like
Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose (Penguin, 1992), about a…
