Book Talk: Tyson, ‘To Infinity and Beyond’

During the past few years, I’ve read four books by Neil deGrasse Tyson, the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Tyson is an astrophysicist who you may have seen on TV. As well as appearing on various science-oriented shows, he’s been host of “Star Talk” on National Geographic. He regularly appears on late night talk shows, and he’s always entertaining. 

The first three books were small-format books, probably aimed at whetting the appetite for a subject that would seem otherwise unappealing to the general public: “Astrophysics for People in a Hurry” (2017, 219 pages), “A Brief Welcome to the Universe” (2021, 235 pages), and “Starry Messenger” (2022, 240 pages). In my case, they achieved their goal.

Only occasionally do I stray from reviewing mystery/thriller books in this column, but I make exceptions for extraordinary books, and Tyson’s latest (co-authored with Lindsey Nyx Walker), “To Infinity and Beyond”, is extraordinary. It is of “normal” size (6.5” x 9.25”), published in 2023, and contains 319 pages of text, diagrams, photographs, and artists’ conceptions.