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Astrophysics for People in a Hurry stayed atop the New York Time’s non-fiction for a sizable chunk of last year, but that was before sex-assault allegations began taking their toll on author Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s reputation. In-spite of the infamous astrophysicist’s tarnished laurels, one might hope that this bestselling book retain it’s educational value.
Unfortunately, Tyson’s dull writing style and lackluster prose combined with his self-imposed brevity overwhelms the most informative chapters and renders the bulk of this title worthless. Tyson’s abstraction is worsened by the maddening crusade to condense content as he struggles with frequent interjection of worthwhile commentary, only to abandon the thread entirely by the following paragraph.
This book is best described as a scattered collection of common astronomical knowledge, most of which the average person could deduce from a few Google searches much more quickly than digesting Tyson’s 132-page spiel. (Not to mention the extensive number of well-written astrophysics titles one could find through Amazon or a local library.) The book’s only redeeming aspects are sparse and found in a small variety of historical references and facts throughout it’s pages, as well as decent summaries of both dark matter and dark energy in chapters 5 & 6, respectively.
“... however big the world is—in our hearts, our minds, and our outsized digital maps—the universe is even bigger. A depressing thought to some, but a liberating thought to me.”
In the final chapter, the reader is anesthesized by an encounter with common rhetoric about how the gap between the human mind and that of a chimpanzee should make you appreciate the possibility of a superior alien organism dwarfing our mental capabilities.
The chimp-human-alien relation may be true figuratively, but it may also be true that our brain has evolved to the approximate limit of what a naturally occurring organism can achieve, and therefore, in a literal sense, wrong. Further, we really have no way of knowing if such a hypothetical has any significance in the real world, yet Tyson makes similar mention of ‘alien(s)’ more than 30 times throughout the book.
Tyson’s epilogue finally collapses with more of the usual humdrum similitudes, most of which will feel trite to those who have read other entries to the popsci catalog. The most impactful of such is quoted below, but knowing that Tyson has undoubtedly repeated the same such awe-inspiring remarks dozens of times in other media only adds to the disingenuous, overstated feeling of his book.
“Time to get cosmic. There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on any beach, more stars than seconds have passed since Earth formed, more stars than words and sounds ever uttered by all the humans who ever lived.”
Astrophysics for People in a Hurry will be best enjoyed by the complete novice, as even readers who took high-school astronomy or have read any equatable book preceding it in the genre will be bored throughout most of the reading experience.
Regardless of Tyson’s personal drama, his book remained on the bestseller list because it promises a high-speed astrophysics crash-course from an expert in his field. Instead, most readers will feel they wasted more time than they saved.
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