Overview

In the early 1900s, many Americans actually believed we had discovered intelligent life on Mars, as bestselling science writer David Baron chronicles in The Martians, his truly bizarre tale of a nation swept up in Mars mania. At the center of Baron's historical drama is Percival Lowell, the Boston Brahmin and Harvard scion, who observed ""canals"" etched into the surface of Mars. Lowell devised a grand theory that the red planet was home to a utopian society that had built gargantuan ditches to funnel precious meltwater from the polar icecaps to desert farms and oasis cities. The public fell in love with the ambitious amateur astronomer who shared his findings in speeches and wildly popular books. While at first people treated the Martians whimsically―Martians headlining Broadway shows, biologists speculating whether they were winged or gilled―the discussion quickly became serious. Inventor Nikola Tesla announced he had received radio signals from Mars; Alexander Graham Bell agreed there was ""no escape from the conviction"" that intelligent beings inhabited the planet. Martian excitement reached its zenith when Lowell financed an expedition to photograph Mars from Chile's Atacama Desert, resulting in what newspapers hailed as proof of the Martian canals' existence.

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David Baron is an award-winning journalist, broadcaster, and author of The Beast in the Garden and American Eclipse. A former science correspondent for NPR, he has also written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Scientific American, and other publications. David recently served as the Baruch S. Blumberg NASA/Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology, Exploration, and Scientific Innovation. He lives in Boulder, Colorado. Rob Greenbaum is a professional narrator and voice-over talent in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Before training in narration and voice-over acting, Rob was a public interest lawyer for approximately twenty years. He's well accustomed to explaining complicated matters so that everyday people can understand them. That was essential in his work for a Native American tribe-dealing mostly with environmental law and cultural issues; as well as in his role as a staff attorney at New Mexico Legal Aid, where he handled consumer rights, landlord-tenant, and family law cases for low-income clients. Both experiences made him comfortable discussing anything from highly technical subjects to sensitive matters requiring understanding and compassion. Being a detail-oriented lawyer also taught Rob the importance of developing his knowledge about subjects with which he may not have been familiar previously. Such diligence equally serves him as an audiobook narrator, particularly for nonfiction. But, like any good attorney, Rob knows that information is only worthwhile insofar as it's used to tell an engaging story.

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