They have been thought of as harbingers of evil as well as a sign of the divine. Solar eclipses-one of the rarest and most stunning celestial events we can witness here on Earth-have shaped the course of human history and thought since humans first turned their eyes to the sky. What do Virginia Woolf, the rotation of hurricanes, Babylonian kings, and Einstein's Theory of General Relativity all have in common? Eclipses. Always spectacular and, today, precisely predicable, eclipses have allowed us to know when the first Olympic games were played and that the Moon was covered by dust long before the first space probe. Eclipses have stunned, frightened, emboldened and mesmerized people for thousands of years. They are recorded on ancient turtle shells in China, on clay tablets from Iraq and on the Mayan "Dresden Codex." They are mentioned in Homer's Iliad and Odyssey and at least eight times in the Bible. Columbus used an eclipse to trick people on...