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Book reviews for "Liller,_William" sorted by average review score:

The Ancient Solar Observations of Rapanui: The Archaeoastronomy of Easter Island (The Easter Island Series)
Published in Paperback by Cloud Mountain Pub (01 August, 1993)
Author: William Liller
Amazon base price: $14.00
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Disappointing contents amidst much white space

This A4-sized slim book is disappointing. Thirty illustrations occupy 19 of its 76 pages, covers included. Twenty-three of those illustrations are small, low-quality, black-and-photographs, typically 60x90mm or 70mmx110mm, which is roughly 2.5x3.5 and 3x4.5 inches. The only colour photograph, on the front cover, of a moai, has nothing to do with astronomy. Lavish use of white space reduces the textual contents to perhaps two dozen full pages.

Rather disappointed and quickly glancing through the text for information I immediately noticed two disturbing inaccuracies. Figure 30, p.50 has this caption: "The Trilithon on the main island of the Republic of Tonga". Tonga is a kingdom, not a republic. The author knows it too, as he writes on page 48: "In 1967 the current monarch, King Taufa'a hau Tupou IV, took interest in the Trilithon".
Page 36: "The markings consisted of a series of straight lines emanating from a point, as shown in Figure 24." Figure 24, overleaf, is a photograph showing markings on a rock, consisting of straight lines connected into a tree-shaped graph, which do not emanate from a single point at all. The photograph is so poor that identifying branches and nodes is difficult, nevertheless I see sixteen branches and eight nodes. The whole thing looks like a quipu, and not at all like lines radiating from a point.

Such discrepancies cast a shadow over the reliability of the rest, which is not presented in an organized fashion easily amenable to scrutiny. Much is second hand, some is vacuous. Thus p.36: "Modern astronomers know that an extremely rare astronomical event took place over the Pacific Ocean in the morning skies of September 13, 1170 A.D. Mars, at the time not far from the Pleiades, passed directly in front of Jupiter. Just as the first light of dawn was appearing, these two big planets [...] appeared to the naked eye as one. This event surely must have galvanized the Islanders. If only someone had recorded what the astronomer-priests had to say about that."
What is the point? Further, was that an exact conjunction and did Mars and Jupiter really did appear as one? Carl Friedrich Gauss reported his surprise at discovering that his mother had such acute eyesight that she saw the phases of Venus. May we not reasonably expect ancient astronomers to have been selected for their eyesight?

Low-quality photographs, inaccurate commentaries, a bare two dozen pages of text presented in disorganized fashion. I feel cheated.


Asteroids to Quasars : A Symposium Honoring William Liller
Published in Hardcover by Cambridge University Press (1991)
Author: Phyllis Lugger
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Cambridge Astronomy Guide
Published in Hardcover by Cambridge Univ Pr (Trd) (1986)
Authors: William Liller and Ben Mayer
Amazon base price: $32.50
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The Cambridge Guide to Astronomical Discovery
Published in Hardcover by Cambridge Univ Pr (Trd) (1992)
Author: William Liller
Amazon base price: $35.00
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Speak Rapanui! Hable Rapanui!
Published in Paperback by Easter Island Foundation (1996)
Authors: Ana Betty Haoa Rapahango, William Liller, and Ana Betty Haoa Rapahango
Amazon base price: $12.00

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