Astrophysics for People in a Hurry

Neil deGrasse Tyson has an extraordinary ability to simplify complex concepts and still make the explanation deep enough for you to learn something beautiful about our universe. I highly recommend hearing the audiobook with the author himself narrating. Even having passed already through many of the concepts in the book, the light that Neil shines on every concept is different and fantastic.

I could not get in to this book. I feel like I should have taken notes to absorb any of the information Tyson presented. Unlike Bill Bryson's “A Short History of Nearly Everything” which interweaves stories with its information, this book is fact after fact after fact and no matter what time of the day I read it, I could not focus on it.

This was a great primer for people who don't know a lot about astrophysics and want to learn more. Dr. Tyson remains a great communicator of psychics and astronomy, and his combination of down-to-Earth metaphors and what he calls “the cosmic perspective” make this introduction to the science physics enjoyable and informative.

This book is fabulous. I was half a chapter in when I asked for a highlighter to mark some of the more illuminating and well written passages. I can't recommend it enough.

Parts of this were more interesting and engaging than others. But I found myself just wanting to get through it, which is the mark of a book that is “just okay” at best.

This was so good. It gave me just enough information to entice me to keep going. The fact that Tyson read the audiobook himself helped a lot as well.

3.5! definitely want to re-read this again at some point. i feel like i can get much more out of it

Meh. This was fine. Snack-size cosmology. Didn't touch me like Sette breve lezioni di fisica, or The Accidental Universe.

Overall very accessible if you have some background in the subject matter. However, the book was also very concise (intentionally) so if you were hoping of diving deeper you might be disappointed.

I listened to the audio version of this book, narrated by Tyson himself. While it is helpful and charming to hear Tyson's enthusiasm for the subject, there are facts and figures that are harder to absorb when just hearing them spoken. How far from Earth is Uranus again? I kind of wish I'd had the printed book to refer to (not that I really need to be able to repeat those facts). Also, I've read other work by Tyson and this is somewhat repetitive–how many times do you have to hear how vast the universe is to grasp how insignificant humans are?–but it IS a useful summary of the cosmic system and how our understanding got to this point. I especially liked the reflections in the last chapter.

I recommend sticking with it to the end. The dark matter/dark energy chapters are fascinating - could have expanded that to the whole book and I would have been happy. Otherwise, it's definitely not for the total science novice but I had enough physics and chemistry background to grasp most of the concepts. Really interesting but I know I won't remember most of it.

THIS is how you write a technical book to reach the masses. Tyson goes deep where necessary and only highlights the rest to connect the dots.

Condensed, focused, and to the point, this book is a very fast read given the technical nature of the topics.

I highly recommend this book to people like me: curious and interested, intelligent (somewhat) and reasonably well-educated, but not an astrophysicist or anything like one. My only gripe is that other reviews had me expecting something more marvelous; this is good but not marvelous.

Also, I find Tyson's philosophy to be sweet but naïve. The whole, “The universe is so big, we must be nice to each other,” as much as I agree with it, is unmoving. Since according to the materialist philosophy the author and non-theists in general espouse, there is no ultimate meaning to existence itself, no purpose to life, the universe, or anything, there is no authority or reason for choosing a way of going through life (being nice or nasty, for instance) other than what one happens to prefer. So Tyson prefers a nice approach. I am very glad he does. But I don't know why, if he is right about the meaninglessness of everything, anybody else should care.

Anyway, I'm being a philosophical grouch. Don't let my grouchiness spoil a good book for you. Read it. Enjoy it. Learn from it. See the world with bigger eyes, or see a bigger world with the same old eyes.

A great little introduction to astrophysics. in a gentle and thoughtful way talks about the world, the universe and everything (related to it in astronomical way). Neil's style is great as always and it's not a difficult read either.

To read about something that took 13 billion years in a hurry almost seems like a travesty. I wouldn't say that now I have unlocked the secrets of the universe. Far from it. But Tyson goes the extra light year to make it somewhat understandable and I think I may have made a slight dent in my universe. I recall trying to read Hawking's A Brief History of Time and by the time I finished Chapter 1, I was gasping for breath. Contrastingly, ...in a Hurry is more patient with you but I freely admit going back couple of paragraphs to re-read what I thought I understood but hadn't.

There's plenty to learn in this short tome especially about the latest strides in discovery and how Einstein really was a genius and justifies all the hype around him. But at the same time, I feel as if physics is keenly awaiting its next Newton or Einstein to explain so much that still remains unexplained. As Durant once said, education is a gradual discovery of your ignorance is so apt when we look up to the skies and look beyond every year.

As far as the solar eclipse on Monday is concerned, did you know that it's such a unique phenomenon just because of this fact - “The Moon is about 400 times smaller than the Sun, but it also just happens to be about 400 times closer. The result is that from Earth, they appear to be the same size.” Mind blown.