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

This is a very fun read for all you science nerds... not only being clear and humorous but wide-ranging and careful to build up a number of those necessary building blocks of knowledge but doing it precisely in order to slam you with the good stuff later.

Like how you'd DIE IN A BLACK HOLE... :)

To belabor the obvious by the title. :)

Seriously, this book gives us a ton of great ways to die and not just by black hole. I really appreciated that. :)

I'd characterize this book as an easy to intermediate stage science book that's very far from being dull and it has a minimum of equations. I'm sure everyone has heard of thermodynamics and E=MC squared and Drake's equation, after all, but what really thrilled me about this was the truly wide array of subjects and Tyson's conversational tone.

You can tell he is still a very, very good science teacher. :)

I can almost hear him say, "Let's throw out the crap, folks, let's dive right into the good stuff." And he does, ranging from the Big Bang to the Heat Death, kinds of possible life on planets, the building blocks we need to understand science, including a great "stick" analogy for understanding the universe without computers, and he even gets into a bit of politics and religion because let's face it: it's a hot discussion item. But thankfully, it's only there as an afterthought.

I wanted science and I got science, exploring the planets, the sun, even quasars, and especially Black Holes. That's the yummy stuff, after all.

10/10 Black Holes agree! Nom nom nom nom nom.

I totally recommend this for both laymen and the intelligently curious and for anyone else who just likes a bit of the good (science) life. It really, really helps that Tyson's a great writer and clear as glass. The light passes right through it without slowing down at all! Can you believe it?

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