The Shadow Club: The Greatest Mystery in the Universe--Shadows--And the Thinkers Who Unlocked Their Secrets

An erudite and fascinating look at the role shadows played in the development of philosophy, psychology, astronomy, the hard sciences, and the arts.

Ignore the hideous subtitle forced on the book by some idiot editor; "The greatest mystery of the universe" --- give me a break. We've all read pop science books that include a mixture of anecdotes and history along with their main subject matter. This book is of that genre, but is far superior to most of them, largely because of the intelligence, scepticism and wit of the author, an accomplished scientist. Unlike most writers, rather than simply informing us of each anecdote or historical fact, he frequently then explains issues around the fact, and concludes with a summary as to why the supposed fact, the received wisdom, is nonsense. This could be tiresome in the wrong author's hands, but is really works well here. As other reviewers have noted, the subject matter is indeed something of a random mixture, perhaps a third dealing with cognitive issues surrounding shadows (things like how do babies perceive shadows, or how does the language we use to discuss shadows tell us something about how we naturally classify the things and the naive physics of the prescientific mind), perhaps a third deals with how shadows (for example eclipses and transits) helped advance the science of astronomy, and a third is misc other things like how shadows helped renaissance artists come up with a theory of perspective. It's rather a strange mixture, but if, like me, you're broadly interested in psychology, history, astronomy and just the world at large, every chapter is fascinating.

The target audience for this book is unclear to me. There is something of interest here for psychologists, artists, art historians, science historians, classical historians and perhaps others. As a professional scientist, I mainly enjoyed the few sections dealing with the history of astronomy. Although the writing is generally clear, the style could be more engaging. Is this because the original Italian text was like that, or did it lose its spark while being translated into English (?) I suspect that the latter is more likely. Anyway, because the book contains such a hodge-podge of information, all centering around shadows, at least parts of it should be of interest to almost anyone; I'm giving it as much as four stars mainly because of this.

Roberto Casati's Shadow Club about shadows goes far beyond their usual definitions to probe shadow's legends, influence on myth and religious beliefs, and changing scientific concepts of the shadow both on Earth and in space. Shadow Club is very highly recommended as an intriguing blend of history, science and anthropology which presents unusual insights into shadows and their lasting impact on mankind.