New Views of the Nine Planets

Books about our planetary system and its nine planets are a dime a dozen, but Michael Benson’s book “Beyond” enters virgin soil. For it’s less about describing how the sun and its planets came into being, or how many kilometers the blue planet Earth is away from the sun, than the other books about planets. By contrast this book presents colorful portraits of the sun and its planets: large-sized, delightfully photographed and edited pictures reveal details and aspects no text could reproduce so vividly.

Some of the photos may be well known, like the striking cover photo of two moons in front of the gigantic disk of the enormous planet Jupiter. But even experts will hardly know most of these pictures of the Sun and moon, Venus and Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, the mini-planet Mercury and the even smaller asteroids. Michael Benson has produced a picture book of the best quality, one in which the texts almost disappear behind the photos – although they nonetheless elegantly arbitrate much information which a non-specialist could scarcely learn from other planet books. This masterwork is worth its proud price of €49,90.

-- Stuttgarter Zeitung, February 27, 2004