I was really here for the science, so I really liked reading those sections. While my heart goes out to her, I wasn’t really interested in yet another memoir about grief, so was less interested in the personal story.

The author of The Smallest Lights in the Universe: A Memoir, Sara Seager, is a pioneering astrophysicist and a professor at MIT. This book is a well-written memoir by Sara.

I have seen the stars in a dark sky since 2015 at a dark skies campus. Yes - I can appreciate them but I have never understood them. While I am not a star person, Sara's writing gifted me the ability to learn some science behind the stars and astronomy without getting involved in a textbook.

If you are a lover of science, memoir, and strong women then this book is a must-read.

Star Rating 4.5

This was just gorgeous! Sara's experience of her husband's cancer and her grief in losing him together with her study of the stars was unlike anything I've read before. She has such a unique perspective, being a scientist who studies space and also a mother and grieving widow. I have recommended this heart-breaking yet so hopeful memoir to multiple of my friends and will continue to do so. I only knocked one star off because, every once in a while, I felt like it went too far in the science direction when I wanted more of the humanity.

This was a really enjoyable memoir about Dr. Seager's various loves: her husband, her kids, her support system, and of course exoplanets and space.

As someone who has experienced (on a smaller scale) loss, grief, and success, as Sara has, I found her depictions of what grief does and how it affects the rest of your life to be among the closest to my own experiences of any literary depiction I have ever read. I am a big baby and I cried hard during the chapters describing her late husband's illness.

The writing was good, although I did find myself wanting to be forgiving about things like imperfect transitions between topics or metaphors that felt a bit off, as a scientist rather than a writer penned this book.

Science is done by scientists. That may seem like an obvious statement, but it’s something often forgotten in the announcements of discoveries, including in astronomy and related space sciences. Discoveries are often attributed—particularly in news headlines—to the spacecraft or observatories used to make them. But those discoveries are made not by spacecraft and instruments, but by people who operate them and analyze the data they produce. Those researchers, like the rest of us, are people with their own motivations to do such work, and struggles to overcome to achieve those discoveries.

That message comes across in The Smallest Lights in the Universe by Sara Seager, a professor at MIT who studies exoplanets. Seager is one of the leading scientists studying exoplanets, participating in NASA missions and winning a MacArthur “genius grant” fellowship. (She is one of the scientists profiled in Five Billion Years of Solitude, the excellent 2013 book by Lee Billings about the search for life beyond Earth.) Her memoir combines the highs and lows of her professional career with the far larger triumphs and tragedies of her personal life.

Growing up in Toronto, Seager didn’t have an interest in astronomy until she saw the night sky in all its splendor during a camping trip at the age of 10. She later described her interest in astronomy as an “almost physical pull” that led to her to study the field at the University of Toronto and then Harvard where, as a graduate student, she started working in exoplanets just as the field was emerging in the latter half of the 1990s. That was something of a risk, since many in astronomy were skeptical of exoplanet research, dismissing it as “stamp collecting” without the rigor of other aspects of astrophysics. “The fear at every school, palpable in the room, was that researching exoplanets was an intellectual dead end,” she writes after recalling an interview for a faculty position at one university.

She kept at it, though, showing it was possible to not only discover exoplanets but study their atmospheres, a step towards finding potentially habitable worlds. She landed a faculty position at MIT and worked on NASA missions. During this time, she married the man she met in college (and bonded with during a summer canoeing in the Canadian wilderness) and had two boys. A happy ending, if the story ended there.

But the story only begins there. She describes how her life was upended when, first, her father dies of cancer back in Toronto. Soon, her husband is also diagnosed with cancer and, after several rounds of chemotherapy, dies. At the age of 40, she’s faced with the prospect of raising her children alone, dealing with the day-to-day issues at home her husband once handled (she was, she explains, extremely focused on her work; late in the book she offers an explanation for that focus, which won’t be spoiled in this review.) A lifeline for her is a group of widows who all live in the same town as her outside Boston, who offer both practical and emotional support.

Gradually, Seager rebuilds her life, and eventually finds new love, while continuing her research. However, it is a struggle, one that leads her to even consider quitting her job at MIT. But perseverance, and support from friends and colleagues, pays off: by the end of the book she has found new stability in her personal life, and new frontiers in her professional one, leading work on a concept called a starshade that could be used in conjunction with a space telescope to directly image other worlds.

The Smallest Lights in the Universe is not a book about the study of exoplanets and the search for life beyond Earth, although there is plenty of that in the book. Instead, it’s about our lives on Earth, as she describes at the end of the book. Looking for life beyond Earth shows that we’re curious and hopeful, “capable of wonder and wonderful things.” It is also a reminder that discoveries do not emerge from a vacuum, nor are they made by machines. They come from people with hopes and fears, struggle and sacrifices, triumphs and setbacks. Just like all of us.

Dnf at 22%. This is another case where I think it might just be the wrong time for me to read this. Sara writes about what life is like raising her two young sons alone after the death of her husband and alternates to give us more of her history and also of her work searching for planets. The detailed description of her work could really appeal to those who are interested in space and science writing. I may revisit this again at a future date but isn’t for me right now.

The Smallest Lights in the Universe is a memoir based on Sara Seager's life. Beginning with her childhood in Canada, she details her life and education, including her adventures and marriage to Mike, becoming a widow with two young children, and finding hope and love again after those difficulties. She discusses very thoroughly the incredible support network she had and was very frank about the fact that she wouldn't have been able to do it without them.

The book is heavily laced with information about her work. As a science teacher, I was fascinated by this and found it extremely interesting. I also found it made the book extremely dense and a little difficult to read. It took me much longer to read than I expected. The vocabulary wasn't particularly difficult, but someone without a scientific background might struggle with some of the terminology and details given. She did a good job of providing simple examples at different points throughout the book.

I found the book to be warm and rich with family and friends, as well as her work, which is so incredibly important to her. I look forward to reading the news and seeing evidence of her discoveries in the future.

Thank you to #Netgalley and the publishers for the ARC. All opinions are my own.

Thanks to NetGalley and the Publisher for an e-ARC of this book in exchange for a fair and honest review.

Dr. Sara Seager is a big name in Planetary Science. I am a graduate student studying planetary surfaces which is a bit detached from her exoplanet work, but I have spent some time studying and teaching astrobiology, and her name is a big one in the field. That was why I was initially drawn to this book. I was not sure what to expect as scientists aren't always the best writers, but I am happy to say this was a fantastic book.

This book is a book about mourning. She opens it up with how she found a group for widowers then she takes a step back to her early stages of her career from her broken home (divorce) to her fathers death and her meeting and eventually losing her husband.

This book was touching from a personal perspective and fascinating from a scientists perspective. We can all relate to her struggle to cope with loss and her fight to succeed. However, I was a particularly interested in her journey to where she is now.

This wasn't a science book, but science is an integral part of her life. We see it mixed in throughout the narrative in a interesting way that was never too distracting or overwhelming.

Overall, I loved it.

In 2016, the New York Times Magazine ran a feature titled, “The Woman Who Might Find Us Another Earth.” It was a profile of astrophysicist Sara Seager who has spent her career looking for Earth-like exoplanets, or planets in other galaxies in the so-called “Goldilocks zone” (not to hot, not too cold, but just right) that have the potential to host life, even if it looks different than our own version. Even though she has the whole universe to search in order to get closer to meeting that goal, the prospect doesn’t seem to daunt her.

But in Seager’s new memoir, The Smallest Lights in the Universe, we are able to see the woman behind the breathtakingly vast science. We are able to look inside her universe. Through cleanly efficient, yet deeply emotional storytelling, Seager gives us a glimpse inside her life: a childhood during which she largely needed to fend for herself, her connection with her father but her estrangement from most of the rest of her immediate family, the way she fell in love with her first husband, the arrival of her two sons, the gradual and excruciatingly painful death of her husband from cancer, and finding a way through her grief after his loss. Through all of this, always acutely present alongside the dramas of her life is Sara’s career and her life’s work of finding the Earth’s partner in life, even after she lost her own.

This is a very well-written and moving memoir. The parallels she is able to draw between her work and her life are subtle, but give the book a really good flow. It’s borderline unfair how a woman so smart and so successful can also be this talented of a writer. She’s not afraid to be completely raw and honest about her grief - she takes you through what I imagine are some of the hardest points in her life, but with a grace and humility that shows a true strength of character. Whether you dig science or not, I think this one will impress you!

I thought the book was laid out well, I liked how the personal stories were intertwined with her scientific discoveries/work.

This is a memoir of Sara Seager's life, to date. She describes her life as a child, adult, dating, children, and the journey that life carries her on. Throughout all of this she maintains her love of the stars. Without giving a spoiler ~ she has to navigate some very difficult life situations, all while managing a very demanding career as a well respected astrophysicist.

Although I enjoyed reading about her life, I found it challenging to fully engage in the explanations on the science of planets. I believe more readers would be engaged if the language was simplified. Then again, if you are a science oriented person, this may be the perfect book for you.

Thank you Crown Publishing and NetGalley for allowing me to review this advance copy of the book.

The Smallest Lights in the Universe by Sara Seager has touched my heart in the most profound way. The author is an MIT astrophysicist who has won "genius" awards, helped to discover new exoplanets, and pioneered ideas for telescopes that will help in exploring space for centuries. But when tragedy strikes her reactions and observations are as human as mine. I have never wanted to hug a stranger more than when reading her story.

Sara has always been the typical "nerd". A loner by nature from a dysfunctional family she realizes early on in life that the stars and space are her passion and pursues an amazing career as a premier scientist and basically a space explorer.

She is as shocked as anyone when she meets Mike. A loner like her they are amazed at how comfortable they are being alone together. They share a passion for canoeing, hiking and the wilderness. They marry and have 2 sons and then the universe intervenes and Mike gets Crohn's Disease (which I also suffer with) and eventually cancer.

How Sara deals with Mike's illness and death is so raw and honest. She does not have some brilliant answer for grief or how to speed up the process of getting over sadness, loneliness, helplessness and anger at the world. She expresses her thoughts and feelings with such pure truthfulness. I related to her emotions as though she had opened my heart and saw all the feelings I have carefully tucked away so no one will be inconvenienced by them.

Sara's journey through her grief and her basic reinvention of her self are intertwined with her work and all the joys, stress, inconveniences, and accomplishments that brings into her life.

I received a free copy of this book from the publishers via NetGalley for a fair and honest review. All opinions are my own.

“It was a moonless night and there were so many stars – hundreds, perhaps, thousands – over my head. I wondered how such beauty could exist – and I wondered too – why no one had told me about it,” writes Sara Seager, astrophysicist, recalling her first glimpse of the mystery of the universe at age ten when she went camping outside her hometown Toronto, Canada. As an adult, Seager does much more than marvel at the stars. She has taken on the amazing task of finding another Earth-like planet for humanity.

The planetary scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who developed pioneering ways to study the atmosphere of exoplanets, is at the forefront of technological efforts to detect an Earth twin. She writes about scientific innovations in a easy-to-follow way. The scientist, the mother of two sons, writes with grace about her personal life as well. For me, the book recalls a line from Carl Sagan’s novel “Contact”: “For small creatures such as we the vastness (of space) is bearable only through love.”

This memoir will touch something in everyone. I enjoyed reading about how the stars helped Sara process the grief at the death of her husband. Yes, there is a lot of information about the stars and other universe but this is how Sara was able to understand the tragedy that befell her family. We are all searching for something and it is amazing when you realize what it is. This is a memoir that is more than dealing with grief, it is about knowing who you are and appreciating live moments.

I received this book from NetGalley and the opinions expressed are entirely my own.

I'm so glad Seager decided to publish such a personal, detailed memoir. Although I can't relate to her grief after losing her husband, I can viscerally relate to the way she interprets and moves through her life. I have never read a memoir by someone who was quite like me. Certain passages made me feel like I was reading something another (albeit a more successful & focused) version of me could have written in another timeline. I feel emboldened to keep going forward with my career trajectory. I feel more secure in my motherhood. I feel a little less alien (which is wonderfully on theme for the book!)

I really enjoyed the details she shared about her work. I don't think she was so technical as to be inaccessible to the casual space enthusiast. I don't know why - but I didn't realize what an astounding technical feat discovering exoplanets is, or how recently humanity accomplished it. I guess to put it more specifically: I didn't realize how indirect the evidence is, and thus how miraculous it is when someone succeeds.

I wish she had spoken more to her autism diagnosis , but I realize that happened quite late in the story, so she is probably still discovering the ways that it has changed (or, not changed) her daily life.

First of all, I would like to thank BookExpo America for providing a digital copy of this book via NetGalley. The Smallest Lights in the Universe is a memoir by famed astrophysicist Sara Seager. I found her narrative style very engaging. There are multiple memorable quotes on the concepts of life and death as well as wonderful musings on the importance of stars in the universe and in our lives. There are also several explanations of concepts in planetary science. I found these (e. g, transit transmission spectra) to be detailed yet never overwhelming. Sara takes us on a journey from the moment she knew she wanted to be an astronomer through many pivotal moments in her personal life and career. She shares her love of nature while also relating some of the barriers she had to overcome in her career. She communicates how as a female in science, she felt she had to constantly prove her value just to keep her position in the field. We get to follow her as she formulates ideas that lead to her seminal work on exoplanets and their atmospheres. I loved getting a look into her reasoning and understanding that when seeking answers to big questions sometimes we must change how we frame our thinking. When looking for life on other planets, we should consider that these planets might create life differently than we do. By looking beyond oxygen and what we know to be the essential elements for life, we might find it easier to find it elsewhere in the universe. While making brilliant game-changing discoveries in her research, we also find her overcoming hardships in her personal life. It was refreshing and inspiring to read about someone who is so successful in her field and yet has experienced feelings of not fitting in, self-doubt and overwhelm. I admire Sara’s honesty throughout this book. This memoir successfully captures how research and discovery can be equally frustrating and rewarding at times. By looking for life in the universe, Sara highlights our desire to find a bit of us in the unknown. I highly recommend this book.

The author of The Smallest Lights in the Universe: A Memoir, Sara Seager, is a pioneering astrophysicist and a professor at MIT. She also led NASA’s Probe Study team for the Starshade project and earned a MacArthur grant. Since childhood she’s loved astronomy and the possibilities that lie beyond our own planet. She’s always been a socially awkward loner. She is on the autism spectrum but isn’t diagnosed until adulthood.

As a child, her life balanced between two extremes. Through the week she lived in a dysfunctional family that included a stepfather she called “the monster”—whose vicious mood swings kept her on tenterhooks—and an enabling mother. Sara spent weekends with her father, a physician who understood and cared for her.

As Sara moves through college, she meets her first husband—another loner—named Mike. They blend because they feel comfortable being alone together. They share the same love of sports and Canada’s wide-open spaces. They marry and have two sons. Mike assumes the stay-at-home parent role, working as an editor, to allow Sara time to search for the stars. Suddenly, he is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and they are forced to deal with his impending death, chemotherapy, and preparing their sons for a life without their dad. Sara finds herself a widow and single mom at age forty and must pick up the pieces of their shattered life and learn to deal with home repairs, car repairs, and the other flotsam and jetsam Mike dealt with.

This memoir is a luminous look at how this successful professional reinvents herself after this loss. She moves from being a loner to “collecting” people who provide support for herself and her family as they adjust to live without Mike. Among these are a group of women, the Widows of Concord, who take Sara in and offer emotional support and advice on the above mentioned home repairs, dating, letting go of the lost loved one, and preparing to let a new love into her life. Along the way, Sara—like all working mothers—must learn to balance work and home life.

A lovely, deeply emotional memoir—I sniffled through parts of it—by an astrophysicist who love for the stars provides a glue that holds her life together.

Sara Seager's memoir is inspiring, moving and sometimes heartbreaking. Her journey of finding her way forward after losing her husband to cancer was the most engaging part of the book for me. There's also plenty of astrophysical content, and although it was written so that a layperson like me could understand it, it was more than I wanted to read on the subject. I found myself skimming through the career-related sections.

Thank you to Read It Forward and NetGalley for the advance Kindle copy.

This was an interesting book, because it touched on so many different issues. It’s about Astrophysicist Sara Seager, who experiences the loss of her husband to cancer. The book starts out with her difficult childhood, where we find out about her love of the stars, and learn about her education. She also deals with what is later diagnosed as Asperger’s Syndrome, which leaves her socially awkward, but also very focused. Not great for relationships, but great for her line of work. The book continues with her marriage, the birth of her sons, and the death of her husband. I lost my mother to cancer, and I’m also a cancer survivor, so I could relate with her difficulty dealing with the medical community. It then moves on to her discovery of a local Widows Support Group; and how they helped her learn to live again. And as if all of this is not enough, interspersed throughout the book is the growth of her career as an astrophysicist. There were a few times when I was a little bogged down with some of the more detailed technical information, but most of the time she kept a good balance between her work and personal stories. I was happy with how the book ended. I felt like she was lucky to have found a number of friends and colleagues who “got her,” because they definitely contributed to her success, both personally and professionally. I liked Sara, because she was a fighter, and I was fighting right along with her throughout the book! Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with this book to read!

I heard about this book at BookExpo and the subject matter really intrigued me. Fundamentally, it's about a woman's journey to recover from the grief of losing her husband and to learn to reconnect with others again. But this woman happens to be a highly accomplished astrophysicist who specializes in exoplanets, on discovering life elsewhere in the universe. I'm sure many readers will identify with the stages of grief and will be comforted by reading about someone going through a possibly a similar experience to theirs. But what I enjoyed the most here was actually learning about exoplanets and about the conditions necessary for life to exist on another planet. I loved Seager's awe at the vastness of the universe and her certainty that other life does exist. These weren't just the visions of a creative sci fi novelist but of a very well-studied scientist. Thinking about the meaning of life, and about other possible forms of life is for me just what is needed now in light of the destruction we've caused to our own planet.