Sasha Sagan’s “For Small Creatures Such As We”

Sasha Sagan holds science-royalty pedigree as the daughter of acclaimed astrophysicist Carl Sagan and his co-author/producer wife, Ann Druyan. In her debut book, Sagan shares the family philosophy imbued upon her and how she intends to create and carry on rituals for her own budding family. Part-memoir, part-natural science and part-guidebook, Sagan’s work is not easily classified. Regardless of the genre, her clever personality shines through the pages as she introduces readers to cultural traditions, across the world and throughout time.

This is a death and grief library, after all, and both play a heavy role in this book. From the first page, we meet child Sasha at the Natural History Museum with her father, first contending with death’s finality. “It’s dangerous to believe things just because you want them to be true,” she is told, the central tenant of the secular philosophy that guided Sagan’s childhood and forms the foundation of this book.

In chapters named, “Birth”, “Coming of Age”, “Weddings”, “Sex” and “Death”, Sagan unfolds the rituals humans have relied upon to mark our most important transitions, always returning to the scientific method as her core dogma and research as the Sagan version of family movie night. Though grief is not a named chapter, it infuses the entire book, as Sagan honors both her father’s huge presence in her childhood and the gaping absence following his death when she was 14.

While there were some things I’d change, ultimately this book is a gentle breaking away from the tethers of organized religion. Of course, when I was 20 I wanted to burn down the establishment, not softly recreate my own, but this book has a place on my shelf for her tender eulogy to her father and all he taught both her and our world. In "For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World", Sagan reminds us of the Sagan family's offering to their fans: in the vastness of our wild world, being alive is an unthinkable miracle and we are all tethered together here in love.

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