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The 1980s saw an explosion of interest in the study of comets and other 'small' bodies in the solar system, attention increasingly focussing on the physical and dynamical interrelationships between the different identified classes of body and the hidden clues they provide for the origin of the solar system and our own world in particular. Comets play an important role in this story, the more interesting because the subject has historical roots extending almost to the beginnings of rational scientific enquiry, encompassing most significant advances in the history of astronomy. The house of comets has many rooms, and this book takes the general reader on a detailed tour ranging from the mezzanine floors of ancient Greece and Rome leading finally up to the top stories still being built: the recent investigations into Halley's comet, the physics of comets, and the structure and dynamics of the Oort cloud.
Yeomans begins with a sympathetic treatment of many of the older notions about comets, their forms and orbital paths, managing to avoid the pitfall of dismissing these ideas out of hand as non-scientific or irrelevant to the final state of the subject while at the same time providing us with a mine of detailed information. His decision to discuss at length only those topics which have been influential to subsequent enquiries will undoubtedly appeal to the reader who wishes to get from the past to the present by the shortest possible root, but it does tend to give the book a teleological flavour which misses some of the complexity and richness of the subject; it could be seen as promoting a rose-tinted view of how science advances, adequate for most purposes but perhaps oversimplified when compared with the false leads and tortuous paths that are more often followed. Still, one sympathises with the difficulties faced by an author in this respect, and despite this slight criticism Yeomans has put together a first-rate introduction to cometary astronomy. Everyone will find something new in this book, while the review of the early returns of Halley's comet and of the application of Newton's laws to cometary dynamics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are second to none. The book's later chapters deal with more recent advances in cometary astronomy, and although they inevitably become rather more technical and narrowly focussed on current mainstream developments as the story is brought up to date, the modern 'successes' are presented with due caution and in such a way that these chapters taken together also provide an excellent (albeit rather breathless) introduction to the modern subject. Finally, the book closes with an extensive bibliography, and an almost complete catalogue of cometary apparitions up to the year 1700. Filling in the remaining gaps will undoubtedly provide a
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