This is a blatant attempt to enlist your help over my book on the Sun, which I have at last finished, just five years late, and which comes out on 1 November in the UK (9th in the U.S.), price £30. Apart from the amazing news that already you can buy it on Amazon for just £15, where I need your help is over a talk I am giving at Waterstone's Piccadilly at 7.00 p.m. on Monday 1 November. Not being Nigella Lawson or Tony Blair, I am not sure that anyone is going to turn up - despite the astounding slide show I've put together based on the book. So if by any chance you are free, it would be lovely to have you there. Please come.
Richard
The author of a new book, Richard Cohen, charts man's ongoing fascination with our nearest star.
In 1925 Carl Jung visited the Pueblo Indians of Taos, New Mexico, and found himself in conversation with one of their elders. "We are the sons of Father Sun," the old man told him, "and with our religion we daily help our father to go across the sky. We do this not for ourselves, but for the whole world. If we were to cease practising our religion, in 10 years the sun would no longer rise. Then it would be night forever."
Such myths are as old as mankind. Cultures may differ on the sun's gender, or how it has come into being, but every civilisation attempts to make some sense of its power. Always there has been a deep ambivalence: humanity cannot do without the sun, but still wishes to tame or seduce it. That remains true to this day.
Updated below with comments by Piers Corbyn