The only other book by Neil deGrasse Tyson I’ve consumed was “Starry Messenger; Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization“. On the way back from Atlanta, I picked it up at the airport and finished it by the time the bird landed in Houston. Although I’d recommend it, there were a few rambles and loose shoestrings within.

Much less so with his “Astrophysics for People in a Hurry“. Having spent over a year on the NY Times bestseller list with more than a million copies sold, the Amazon page for this tome has a 4.6/5 rating with over 36K reviews and not one 1-star assessment. With only 208 pages in a small-format hardcover, this is compact and covers very well the essentials of astrophysics, with chapter titles reflecting the content: “Between the Galaxies”, “Dark Matter”, “On Being Round”, and “Exoplanet Earth” among others.

On its best side, the book enumerates great comparisons and puts his subject in great perspective, tossing aside difficult mathematics (for me) for easy to understand (even for me) comparisons, such as “In our own solar system, for example, everything that is not the Sun adds up to less than one fifth of one percent of the Sun’s mass” (p. 83). His explanation of why gallium is used to detect neutrinos finally makes complete sense to me.

He touches a few times (esp. p. 98) on the basics of scientific inquiry, and how the knowledge-accumulating process can start with imperfection and squirm, through argument and experiment and observation, to better, more detailed explanations of the observable universe.

The only illustration is a line-drawn sign about the speed of light in the form of a highway speeding sign, yet an illustration would have helped in at least one explanation, where (p. 116) he poorly describes the elements chlorine and sodium, and 1 page later fails to mention the next 2 elements he describes are the fuel of the rockets which take our emissaries to the planets and beyond.

As far as errors go, I can count only 1, where a description on p. 30 contradicts what is written on p. 204.

That is quite a feat. And it leads me to tell you — should the subject be of interest — to travel as close to the speed of light as you can muster to get “Astrophysics in a Hurry“.