"The Planets" is an entertaining and sometimes very personal look at our Solar System neighbours. Sobel describes herself as having a “planet fetish" and in this book, she shares her obvious passion for the subject. This enthusiasm has developed from a young age and the introduction describes a "shoe-box diorama" of the planets that she created for a science fair, her school class staging a planets play (where she played a “lonely star” finding companionship from the formation of the planets) and a school trip to Hayden Planetarium.

The book kicks off with "Genesis" which describes the formation of the Universe, the Solar System and the Earth. In this section passages from the first book of the Bible are interspersed throughout the main scientific concepts which are all described in a wonderfully poetic fashion. Her prose serves to emphasise the beauty of reality and poses the question of whether it all happened by chance or by divine design.

The strength of the book is the way Sobel combines scientific principles, culture, mythology and even poetry to provide a more satisfyingly complete and entertaining view of each planet than just dry, factual information. Reading the chapter "Beauty" shows that Venus is obviously the darling of poets. Tennyson, Blake and Wordsworth all help to illustrate the interplay of our bright and shining neighbour with the Sun. Beginning as the brightest morning star, Venus disappears behind the Sun for about 50 days before becoming a magnificent evening star. This chapter about Venus emphasises the planet's femininity, being a female goddess in all mythology (apart from Mayan/Astec, for some reason). She is a savage beauty, however, and Sobel also describes the harsh realities faced by the Russian Venera and Vega missions where landers melted or crumpled under atmospheric pressure equivalent to 3000 feet below sea level. The runaway greenhouse effect has created what Sobel describes as a "hell fire cauldron" of a planet where the thick cloudy atmosphere ensures the Sun is never seen from the surface.

A friend of mine was particularly taken by the chapter about Saturn which should appeal to all those musically minded in particular. Entitled "Music of the Spheres" after a phrase coined by Plato to describe the "melodious perfection of the heavens", this examines the resonance of planetary orbits and associates the patterns with music. We learn that while Kepler developed his three laws of planetary motion he also created melodies for each planet where the notes depicted the different speeds at given points along their orbits. Interestingly, the Golden disk on the Voyager spacecraft, designed to inform extraterrestrial species about the human race and our home Solar System, also includes "music of the spheres" in the form of computer-generated tones to represent the velocities of the planets.

Gustav Holst’s Opus 32, "The Planets, a Suite for Orchestra" is still the most famous and popular musical tribute to the Solar System. Sobel informs us that Old Father Time, "Saturn", was Holst’s favourite movement from his masterwork as it represents a vision of fulfilment that comes with advanced age. As Pythagoras discovered, the pitch of a plucked string rises one octave when shortened in length by a half and vibrations between strings with whole number resonances are found to be pleasing to the ear. Sobel notes that Saturn's ring system is full of such resonances between the orbits of its ring system, its moons and the rotation of its magnetic sphere. In this way, we can see that Saturn is making its own music.

The concluding chapter, “Planeteers” gives an insight into the enthusiasm of those involved in prominent space missions. Such missions are often huge multinational affairs, for example, the successful Cassini mission to Saturn involved five thousand people from over seventeen different countries. Sobel tells a first-hand account of a gathering to celebrate Cassini’s successful insertion into Saturn’s orbit and everyone's excitement about the mission's next phase to land the Huygens probe on Titan. Space exploration and expanding the boundaries of our cosmological understanding brings joy to many and this is amplified many times for those directly involved.

"The Planets" is an enjoyable read and examines a surprisingly wide range of different aspects of Earth's neighbours: factual, cultural and mythological. Described by Sobel as an "assortment of precious gems", the planets are presented in this book almost like different characters, each with their own personalities and idiosyncrasies. The result is one of those rare non-fiction tiles that can be read cover-to-cover and enjoyed being re-read many times.