Tear Jerker / Spock's World

• In the "historical" chapter featuring Surak. His My God, What Have I Done? while he watches the newscast about the invention of antimatter bombs, and his subsequent Heroic BSoD as he contemplates the death and destruction that are sure to follow are utterly heart-breaking.
  Death, it was all death, there was no escape from it. Destruction was very near, the death to end all the deaths, unless something was done.
• Thankfully, the second Tear Jerker is from pure joy as Surak has his moment of Epiphany Therapy:
  Celebration would win, was winning, had won now. Everything was one moment, and that moment was nothing but triumph and joy.
• The historical chapters are rife with these, thanks to the nature of the Vulcans before Surak introduced cthia to them. It's not uncommon for main characters and their loved ones to meet unpleasant fates.
  • One chapter introduces a group of proto-Vulcans, one of whom creates the first words in the Vulcan language. He and his tribe are later killed by the solar flare that turns Vulcan into a barely habitable desert.
  • Another chapter sees the tribe that would introduce the Vulcan second eyelid into the gene pool from the perspective of one of the female members, who later loses her mate in a sandstorm. She later learns that, had they followed a different path, her mate would have survived.
  • One chapter features a dysfunctional family in a small ship that, following an unfortunate series of events, find their ship out of control on a suicide course. The ship is destroyed with all hands and, due to political lies, sparks another war on the volatile planet.
• Sarek's dilemma throughout the book - as the Vulcan ambassador, he is duty bound to argue the official position of Vulcan secession, yet if his arguments were to carry the day, it would inevitably break his soul as he would be forced to choose between his planet and people or his wife and son, who, as a human and half-human respectively, would no longer be welcome on Vulcan.