Utah State University associate professor of English Christopher Cokinos appears on the national radio program “Science Fantastic” Saturday, Aug. 1, to discuss his new book “The Fallen Sky: An Intimate History of Shooting Star.” The radio show is hosted by Michio Kaku, an internationally known physicist and populizer of science. The broadcast is carried by more than 100 stations across the country, including three in Utah. A list of radio stations that broadcast “Science Fantastic” is available online (http://www.mkaku.org/scifan.htm).

At USU, Cokinos teaches creative writing courses, including nonfiction and poetry in the Department of English. He has a strong interest in research-based personal narratives and the lyric essay. He also has taught courses on American nature writing and the nonfiction literature of space exploration. At USU he is the founder of “Isotope: A Journal of Literary Nature and Science Writing.”

“The Fallen Sky” is to be released July 30, and Cokinos will be featured in a launch reading Aug. 27 at King’s English Bookstore in Salt Lake City at 7 p.m.

A description of Cokinos’s book appears on Amazon.com.

“Weaving natural history, memoir, and the stories of maverick scientists, daring adventurers, and stargazing dreamers, this epic work takes us from Antarctica to our space to tell the tale of how the story of meteorites because a scientific passion,” the Web site said.

Early reviews for the book are positive.

“In his quest to understand the passions of the opportunists, innovators and romantics that popular the history of meteorites, the author traverses the globe, tracing their footsteps, absorbing their stories and, ultimately, understanding their obsession,” Kirkus Reviews said in a June review. “Throughout this well-paced narrative, the author's naturalist tendencies bloom in his lush descriptions of his surroundings. The last section, which details an arduous trip to the far frontiers of Antarctica, is a thrilling account of the extreme psychological and physical endurance required to complete such field research. … The author's enthusiasm is infectious in this chronicle of astronomical passion.”

Future feature stories or reviews of the book are slated to appear in “Wired,” “Discover,” “Seed,” “Natural History,” the “Kansas City Star” Sunday Magazine, “Meteorite” magazine and elsewhere. Cokinos has taped an interview for “Sierra Club Radio” and the book was listed as “Notable” in the August issue of “Scientific American.”