'Fallen Sky ' illuminates science of meteorites

Chicken Little kind of had it right -- the sky is falling, in fireballs and chunks of rock hewn by a tumble through Earth's atmosphere.

Christopher Cokinos hunts these meteorites from backyards to Australia's Outback to museum exhibits in The Fallen Sky: An Intimate History of Shooting Stars.

With the help of a glossary, Mr. Cokinos breaks down the science of meteorites -- their origins, what throws them our way and what's inside them. It's "an intimate history," he writes, because the stardust that formed meteorites is present in everything: a lawyer, apples, Jupiter, a mouth, an asteroid containing enough gold to make 2 billion wedding bands.

The Fallen Sky is no textbook, however. It highlights notable meteorites, but the book primarily focuses on the people who scour fields for the space rocks.

One modern meteorite dealer begs Mr. Cokinos not to portray his fellow enthusiasts as eccentrics and, acknowledging that as a birder he knows something about quirky hobbies, he doesn't.

He could have, with this cast of characters: a fame-seeking polar explorer; a mining engineer who popularized the idea that craters could be caused by meteors; a biology professor who opened the first meteorite museum; a Kansas farming family whose land seemed like a magnet for meteorites; an Oregon immigrant who stole a 15-ton meteorite.

They're not lab-coated scientists in sterile, theoretical environments. Through Mr. Cokinos' sympathetic eyes, they're ordinary people picking up extraordinary objects. Some shattered and left pieces of themselves strewn across continents.

Others remained steady as, well, rocks.