When We Look at the Moon, We See Ourselves — Craters and All

OUR MOON: How Earth’s Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are,by Rebecca Boyle

I had two memorable experiences with the moon this year. The first was seeing the “blue supermoon” rise over Lake Michigan in August. The second, a few weeks later, was watching it quietly slip in front of our sun, casting the world below in an eerie, ethereal glow.

Both of these moments left me with a sense of awe that I was not expecting. Frankly, I’ve always found the moon a bit boring. If you could study anything in the universe, I thought — the depths of black holes, faraway stellar explosions, or ghostlike particles called neutrinos, as I did — why on Earth would you ever pick the unmysterious moon?

But the science writer Rebecca Boyle proved me wrong. In “Our Moon,” Boyle walks the reader through a history of both Earth and humanity, from the formation of our planet and the evolution of life to the development of civilization, religion, philosophy and, eventually, science. And through it all, she argues, the moon has played a starring role in how we came to be, and who we are.