Where Neil Schools Us on Some Stuff

Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries by Neil deGrasse Tyson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This has been my before-sleep short read for a few weeks. With forty-two short essays, many of them just 6 or 7 pages long, it's ideal for the sleepy brain. I liked it quite a bit. 4 stars.

These meditations on the big bang, on black holes, on the spaces between stars, and many other physics and astronomy questions are conversational little tidbits that don't break a lot of new ground (especially as I'm reading it 20 years after it was published), but I still found something in literally every essay that was new to me or made me think about something a new way. A scientifically literate reader will already know most of this, and I think I'm pretty well along on that scale, but there are still things he brings into each of his essays that inform me and amuse me and make the reading meaningful. The best fun in non-fiction like this is learning new things.

His voice comes through perfectly clear in the whole thing (which is a plus or minus, depending on the reader's take) and his tone is almost always light, joshing, and, IMO, pleasant. That's the right approach for this kind of popular science. It's not the deadly earnest, erudite tone of Richard Dawkins (who writes great books but is hardly tolerable in person--and has made himself disagreeable the same way JKR has). Nor is it the wide-ranging, surprising, and wandering musings of Stephen Jay Gould (who is greatly missed). Neil deGrasse Tyson is a very smart man in his own right, but he takes a different tack in media, including this book, and I think it's very successful. He wants to explain things to a broad audience in a way that entertains while it educates. He keeps the learning curve very gentle here, the cognitive demand relatively low, but that was his intention, and the way he makes it work may be his genius. In another's hands, this could be a much tougher and much less engaging read.

The only place the author gets a little sharp--deservedly so--and a little less charitable is when he's protecting science from fuzzy religious thought, like creation versus the big bang and similar topics. I think he's earned the right to be just as firm on the topic as he wants. And I don't think it detracts from his amiable, laughs-at-his-own-jokes tone that he gives us though almost every page.

If this fails to dazzle, it nevertheless amuses, and it's full of good science information. I learned a lot more than I would have guessed in these essays on familiar topics. Easy 4 star rating. If you're in the mood for non-fiction but want just bits here and there, just a chunk per day, this is a good choice to put on your bedstand. And if you're lucky like me, you'll find it at a little bookstore for a couple dollars. A steal.

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