THE PLANETS by Dava Sobel (4th Estate, £15): TEN years ago Dava Sobel, an American writer, enjoyed a smash hit with Longitude, the story of attempts to produce an accurate seagoing clock, finally achieved by Yorkshireman John Harrison, to solve the problem of calculating longitude.

Part of the appeal lay in the author's often tangential approach to her subject matter. Now, in what her publishers introduce as a "groundbreaking new work" that "traces the lives of each member of our solar family", the same sideways lead-in proves only a stumbling block.

Let the example of the moon, introduced in a chapter headed, typically, Lunacy, suffice:

During the glory days of the Apollo project, a young astronomer who analysed Moon rocks at a university laboratory fell in love with my friend Carolyn, and risked his job and the national security to give her a quantum of Moon dust. "Where is it? Let me see!" I demanded at this news. But she answered quietly, "I ate it." After a pause she added, "There was so little." As though that explained everything.

I was furious. In an instant I had dropped from the giddy height of discovering the Moon right there in Carolyn's apartment to realising she had eaten it all without leaving a crumb for me.

In reverie I saw the Moon dust caress Carolyn's lips like a lover's kiss. As it entered her mouth, it ignited contact with her saliva to shoot sparks that lodged in her every cell. Crystalline and alien, it illuminated her body's dark recesses like pixie powder, thrumming the senseless tune of a wind chime through her veins. By its sacred presence it changed her very nature: Carolyn the Moon Goddess. She had mated herself to the Moon somehow via this act of incorporation...

Please, Dava, just give us the facts.

Published: 14/02/2006