Review: Astrophysics for People in a Hurry

Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I enjoy Neil deGrasse Tyson's writing and even more his televised, radio, and in-person performances. While he is more of an extrovert entertainer than popularizers in his past, he does not have the gift of enlightening simplification had by Sagan and Asimov, etc. This is the closesty I feel Tyson gets to a "billions and billions" sharing of awe:

One of the pillars of big bang cosmology is the prediction that in every region of the cosmos, no less than about ten percent of all atoms are helium, manufactured in that percentage across the well-mixed primeval fireball that was the birth of our universe. Since the thermonuclear fusion of hydrogen within stars gives you helium, some regions of the cosmos could easily accumulate more than their ten percent share of helium, but, as predicted, no one has ever found a region of the galaxy with less.

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