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Title: Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries
ISBN: 1433200228
Author:
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Publicate Date: 2007-04-02
Publish: 2007-04-02
List Price: $29.95
Average Customer Rating: 4.5
Format: CD-ROM
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $18.87
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $18.50
Amazon Merchant Price: $23.66
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| Customer Review: |
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1: A Masterpiece of Popular Science Writiing
This is science writing at it's very best but more fun and more accessible than even past masters such as Gould and McPhee. Highly recommended!
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2: Best astronomy book for novices
This book is witty and well written. If you love to learn about astronomy this is the book for you.
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3: Another good book by Dr. Tyson
I am a student of astrophysics and I just wanted something simple to read about my favorite subject. This is exactly what I got. Dr. Tyson's book conveyed the cosmos throughly in a very entertaining tone. I will be buying more of his books.
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4: Gould for the Common Man?
Neil deGrasse Tyson is the current director of the hayden Planetarium and an astrophysicist with the American Museum of Natural History. His picture shows a portly African-American with a wry smile, wearing a vest with astonomical figures perhaps cut from a wizard's robe discarded by Hogwarts. Most likely half of America knows better what he looks and sounds like than I do, since he appears frequently on TV, on the Daily Show and various Fox blathergrounds. I heard him talking about comets for a few minutes on my car radio, and found him very quick, very amusing.
A comparison with Stephen Jay Gould is almost inevitable. This book, like most of Gould's, is a selection of Tyson's columns for the magazine Natural History. Tyson has a lighter touch and will be easier going for people without much background in science. He is nowhere near as encyclopedic or allusive as Gould, which will come as a relief to many. Gould wrote, increasingly so over the years, as a Harvard Don, which all the rhetorical flourishes of a man who expects his readers to be very erudite. The danger of such writing is pomposity and condescension. Since I almost became a Harvard Don myself, I have a high tolerance for pomposity, but I find Tyson's writing style delightfully relaxed.
Tyson's subject in Death by Black Hole is the astronomical zoo of gravitationally caged objects - stars, planets, comets, asteroids, and Anomalous Flying Objects - in what we still call the Universe, although the name seems less and less appropriate. Tyson back-fills as needed with tidbits of history but his central purpose is to make us acquainted with current observational astronomy. People who "already know all that" will enjoy his witty delivery, while the rest of us will learn quite a lot, quite painlessly.
One of the Identified Flying Objects Tyson describes is the asteroid Apophis, which ought to be of maximum interest for anyone under 40 years old. Tyson writes: "On Friday the 13th of April, 2029, an asteroid large enough to fill the Rose Bowl as though it were an egg cup, will fly so close to Earth that it will dip below the altitude of our communication satellites ...If the trajectory of Apophis at close approach passes within a narrow range of altitudes called the Keyhole, the precise influence of Earth's gravity on its orbit will guarantee that seven years later in 2036...the asteroid will hit earth directly, slamming in the Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii." You knew that, didn't you, and you've already made reservations for the observation grandstand on Mt. Whitney? What a show! But Tyson continues: "The tsunami it creates will wipe out the entire west coast of North America, bury Hawaii, and devastate all the land masses of the Pacific Rim." Oops. I'd better warn my grandchildren to sell my house in SF before it's too late.
Tyson doesn't mention it, but there's an upside to Apophis -- no need to worry about global warming after all.
In fact, Tyson is not all levity about Apophis, or about the inevitable fate of civilization. Later in the book, he discusses what "we" should be doing about our self-preservation in a universe that is far from anthropically perfect for human life, or any kind of life at all. Read it and quake - from laughter as well as fear.
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5: Great Bedtime-Bathroom Book
I hate to use those descriptors in the title but I couldn't think of a better way to say it. This book is a collection of short essays that enlighten and entertain in a way that Dr Tyson is so uniquely qualified to do. Many of the topics are great for dinner conversation, especially the ones that discuss the relationship between science and religion.
I kept it on my bedside and read a few essays before bed and then placed it in the bathroom where guests often find themselves engaged with the witty and knowledgeable information. Worth the purchase.
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