Review:This is a first-rate example of how to write about science for a general audience. Its good-humored and fair account of the controversy over whether Pluto is a planet, a Trans-Neptunian object, a Kuiper body, or any or all of the above is gripping and fascinating. I cannot praise Neil deGrasse Tyson too highly. He has justified his claim to be the successor to the late, great Carl Sagan, who would have applauded THE PLUTO FILES. Read more

Review:The book is indeed BRIEF and I was mildly shocked when it arrived. My last physics book was easily 20 times heavier. The author no doubt knows his subject matter and has a gift for language and simplification. He even waxes poetic at times. Perhaps it's no accident he is Italian. I frankly cannot imagine an English or German physicist being so lyrical - nor brief.

The lessons as such are really not "lessons" in the sense of what you get at graduate school or even college. The reason for t... Read more

Review:Enjoyable read, fun and interesting, Not overbearing or too technical to enjoy. Neil is a great writer and this is essentially a collection of essays from his published work in magazines. A wide collection of interesting topics, Read more

Review:I got it for my brother for Christmas. I asked him what he thought about it but he said a bunch of stuff I didn't quite understand but he was smiling while he talked about it so it was probably good stuff. Read more

Review:Bought this for my 15 year old son who has Aspergers and is home schooled. He really likes it and is blazing through it! On days that I let him choose subjects to work on he always wants to do physics first! Read more

Review:Don't believe the editorial review by Gilbert Taylor. Sagan only mentions Pat Robertson in passing. It was actually sort of a footnote about how the televangelist got his fanatical anti-abortion viewers to skew the results of a phone survey.

The phrase "billions and billions" is not really Sagan's "cliche", because he never actually said it. But Sagan's description about how that fallacy got started is actually very amusing, so I can't imagine why someone would call it "flat", but I get t... Read more

Review:I love the print version of this atlas, but not the Kindle edition. The scan resolution is poor. The navigation is underwhelming. When you look at a map, there are arrows in the margin to indicate the adjoining map. How hard would it have been to make those arrows "active" so that you would be transported to that map? Colour me disappointed! Read more

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Review:This book takes the reader behind the scenes of the Space Race of the 1950's, into the little known contribution made by the one woman on the engineering team that sent the first U.S. satellite into orbit.

George Morgan's mother became singularly, almost pathologically, uncommunicative after she retired from North American Aviation. So her son had to reconstruct her life from the relatively few remaining sources available to him. He had to reverse engineer it, so to speak, probably invent... Read more

Review:This book does not include an access to MyStatLab (access code required). If your class requires you to log in to MyStatLab, except to pay around $95 extra. With that, the price is only a little bit better then getting it from my college book store. Book came clean, new, and with a CD like expected. Read more