Books: The man who fell to Earth

Nibley » It would be a huge let-down if the author of a book about meteorites failed to show you at least one such object from his personal collection.

Christopher Cokinos, the soft-spoken proud parent of a new 528-page book on the subject, The Fallen Sky: An Intimate History of Shooting Stars , doesn't disappoint. His "show-and-tell" space rock, a specimen from North Africa, was purchased for $80 from a meteorite dealer in Arizona.

Hefting it between his hands in the resplendent home he shares with his partner near the Blacksmith Fork River, Cokinos recites his meteorite's peculiar qualities:

Meteorites, which are heavier than terrestrial rocks, carry

magnetic pulls. The nickel iron of Cokinos' meteorite shines through at several protruding points, as if worn by touch. Its "thumb," created from uneven heating when it flew through space and into the Earth's atmosphere, reveals an eerie but disfigured beauty.

The rock's true show-stopper, though, is its two layers of "fusion crust," the first formed when it melted upon entering the atmosphere, the second born when it split open in flight to melt once more.

Cokinos knows well the ways in which meteorites large and small have inspired legends and poems, sparked feuds and jealousies, obsessed scientists and even induced madness. All of that inspired -- and complicated -- his decision to write a book about the subject. "I had

reservations and didn't know how I was going to write this book for a long time," he said.

His book The Fallen Sky: An Intimate History of Shooting Stars , published this month by Tarcher/Penguin, is as curiously shaped, luminous and often just as chance-driven as the universe itself.

But the intriguing nature of its nominal subject -- meteorites' fleeting velocity, the cultlike devotion they inspire among collectors, as well as the intense study by scientists convinced they reveal the secrets of the universe and creation -- made it ideal for the burgeoning market of books popularizing science.

Cokinos, 46, a Utah State University associate professor of English, has been there before. His 2000 book, Hope Is the Thing With Feathers , entranced readers and critics with its lyrical prose and its heartbreaking story about how six species of exotic North American birds came to extinction. Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature, hailed Cokinos' first book as the story "of the ghost species still haunting this continent."

Cokinos is a nonfiction writer who builds his texts through time and extensive research. Hope Is the Thing With Feathers was 10 years in the making, while Fallen Sky required eight years. Over that time, Cokinos has won numerous grants and fellowships, from the National Science Foundation, as well as winning such prestigious literary honors as the Whiting Writers Award, Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award and Glasgow Prize for an Emerging Writer in Nonfiction.

Reviews of Fallen Sky range from mixed to ecstatic. The Associated Press issued a tepid review. Former New Mexico senator and astronaut Harrison Schmitt, a geologist for Apollo 17, took issue with the book's heavy-breathing prose style in a recent Wall Street Journal review. "Emotive personal musings insert themselves far too often," Schmitt harped.

In generous compensation, no less an authority on nonfiction science writing than Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb , called Fallen Sky a "first-class book about meteorites."

"He did it all on his own," said Michael Sowder, a poet and associate professor of English at USU who has known Cokinos six years. "He didn't start out with easy connections in New York, he just wrote Hope while an adjunct professor at Kansas State University and took off from there. He's an incredibly diligent researcher and worker."

A self-described "child of the suburbs" from Indianapolis, Cokinos said he was drawn to nature and science gradually, and only after many hikes. A penchant for the austere environmental themes of American poet Robinson Jeffers helped. So did the striking sight of a broad-winged hawk feasting on a squirrel from atop a tree on the campus of Indiana University, where Cokinos earned his bachelor's degree before earning an MFA in creative writing at St. Louis' Washington University.

"It was intense and beautiful," Cokinos said. "I kept having experiences like that that took me outside of myself."

With Fallen Sky , he reveals his interior journey. While dispensing theories of how meteorites may have introduced the amino acids necessary for life on Earth, he also muses on "ways the fallen sky can reveal secrets not only of the solar system but of our hearts."

Seeing the "dusty denouement of the solar system's creation" in interplanetary dust one summer night in Idaho, as recounted in the book's opening pages, revealed the reality of beginnings and endings in nature. That notion comforted Cokinos in his decision to end his first marriage of more than 10 years and begin a relationship with partner Kathe Lison, who also teaches English and creative writing at USU.

Similar personal parallels are drawn throughout Fallen Sky. The marriage of early 20th-century Welsh immigrant Ellis Hughes dissolves after his losing battle to secure rights to the Willamette Meteorite, which he discovered on property belonging to Oregon Iron and Steel Company. The author's own breakdown of sorts following the trail of meteorites in the Antarctic follows renowned meteorite collector Harvey Nininger's bitter fight and lasting grudge over the famous "Norton bolide" meteorites of Kansas.

Those allergic to first-person references in prose are warned in advance that Fallen Sky often outdoes itself. Watching Cokinos gather and fuse disparate strands of science, biography and personal experience, verging on trauma, pays unique rewards, though. The afterword -- in which Cokinos watches a bird recover after flying into a window, then notices the bird gone soon after turning his head to witness a daylight fireball -- has a reverbing poignancy.

Cokinos defends his book's rotation on a very personal axis, saying he's wary of writers who aren't always honest about ways their personal experiences influence a text behind the scenes.

Re-reading Henry David Thoreau's Walden , Cokinos said, gave him permission to pay attention to his life as well as his subject. "Even John Muir said as much when he said, 'Going out is going in,' " Cokinos said. "People deserve to know that a writer's choices are determined by a writer's life."

Finding a meteorite years after its fall from the sky is rare, Cokinos said, even in an "underhunted" state like Utah. As Fallen Sky makes clear, finding what you're looking for is a messy search that requires you know the terrain and pay close attention to it. Even after its discovery, there's no guarantee it's yours.

"It would be sweet to find a meteorite out on a hike," Cokinos said. "But I don't think that will ever happen. It would be too perfect."