Impact Earth: Asteroids, Comets and Meteors : The Growing Threat

We assume these events are rare. They are not. Their time-averaged death toll equals that of earthquakes and major floods. We assume these impacts rarely affect our lives. Author Austen Atkinson convincingly demonstrates that meteor and asteroid strikes have, and will again, skew human history in spectacular and terrible ways.

Impacts from objects no bigger than a baseball can, under the right conditions, wipe out cities. There is nothing we can do about them, as such objects are too small to be detected. On the other hand, bigger objects--the planet killers of films like Deep Impact and Armageddon--can be detected, and diverted, with existing technology but only if there is the global will to act accordingly. Impact Earth is a call to political arms as well as a work of popular science. It is deliberately sensationalist, and entirely serious. Atkinson, like many of the distinguished observers and scientists he quotes, is attempting to put cosmic debris strikes on the world political agenda. He is entitled to be loud. --Simon Ings, Amazon.co.uk

In the second half of the book Atkinson uses the facts he's outlined to create a fictional scenario - to allow readers to understand how it would feel to live through such an impact. It's very effective. I started out a sceptic, but Impact Earth changed my mind.
July 25, 2002

Besides being a captivating subject I was impressed by the way Austen Atkinson researched the subject so thoroughly and gave a chillingly detailed and logical treatment of the risk of Earth impacting with comets, asteroids and other bodies in space.

This book is a call to action on a par with Rachel Carlson's Silent Spring, in my opinion. It should be required reading for every legislator, teacher and anyone under the age of 30 with hopes of seeing middle and later life. Austen Atkinson did something very unique in Impact Earth. He added a second book to the end, a fictional account of what it might be like to experience a major impact. If the first book does not get attention, the second surely will. It adds a human element that is missing from other more technical books on this subject. Both parts of Impact Earth are expertly done and written for the lay person in a manner that makes the impact risk clear and obvious to anyone able to read. Austen is a great writer. His style is easy reading and his development is extremely logical and captivating. This is one for every middle school library and a great gift item for the skeptic on your list.

Larry Robinson Sunflower Observatory Kansas
June 25, 1999