Tunguska: A Siberian Mystery and Its Environmental Legacy by Andy Bruno
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
In 1908 something odd happened.
Well, probably many odd things happened, but the event that brought about much eventual fascination happened in Siberia near the Tunguska river. Some giant explosion shook the ground and flattened the surrounding forest. Apparently the consensus is that it was a meteorite, but eventual expeditions (all delayed not only because of the remoteness and poor transportation, but political situation in the ensuing couple of decades) found no signs of an impact crater or meteorite fragments. The prevailing thought is atmospheric explosion of a cosmic body, most likely a meteorite, but over the century since the impact there have been quite a few ideas of what happened. (The best, of course, was the version that attributes Tunguska event to the atmospheric explosion of alien nuclear-powered aircraft).
”The members of Sakura believed that millennia ago the Japanese had created a technologically advanced society that had mastered nuclear power and space flight. Tunguska occurred, according to their scenario, when a group of Japanese-descended space travelers tried to return to their homeland in 1908 and experienced a devastating crash. The Sakura group had come to pay homage and hoped to be reunited with their brethren.”
Andy Bruno clearly knows a lot about what happened there. And he certainly doesn’t skim on details. Which normally I’d be good with, but something about this book makes it feel drier than usual, maybe because the detail overload gave it a scattered and unfocused feel. It was not easy to keep my attention on it, and my eyes just seem to slide off the pages. It just never ended up engaging me with an occasional exception here and there, but not enough to keep me from falling asleep trying to read it night after night.
I was unreasonably excited when I realized that the actual book ended about halfway in, and the rest was notes/bibliography. And that says it all about my engagement level with it.
For an established Tunguska enthusiast it will probably be a great read, but for a more casual reader it may end up just a bit too tedious.
2 stars. Not for me. But if you are into meteorite science, you may end up liking it a bit more than I did.
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Thanks to NetGalley and Cambridge University Press for providing me with a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.
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