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"Starry Messenger" is, in my opinion, not a good look for Tyson. In it, he comes across as an elitist, conceited bezzerwizzer.

While I do not disagree with the general message in this book - that scientifically literate people are less likely to fall victim to misinformation, hype, conspiracy theories, etc. - Tyson probably shouldn't have illustrated this by sharing how much better (he thinks) he is than other people.

He also utterly fails at delivering an objective and fact-based-only perspective on some seriously hot-button topics of our contemporary world. Make no mistake, everything in this book is his own opinions. Some sound more logical, well-founded, and generally shaped by evidence (as intended), because they are. Others are very clearly opinions and feelings - not infrequently poorly supported - that Tyson tries to justify.

The result is a book that sometimes argues for the importance of nuance and perspective with simplistic and binary arguments. Never mind that the book is replete with Tyson's feigned surprise at some of his Twitter feuds/drama... Not a very "cosmic perspective" that.

Given a do-over, I'd skip this one.





Update May 2023:
Oh boy, I just watched an interview with Tyson from the publicity tour of this book. It was almost exclusively dealing with his flat-out weird reasoning surrounding the vegetarian/vegan bits of the book. I didn't mention those in my original review; plenty of other people did and, after all, Tyson's woefully lacking arguments were just regurgitation of some of the dumber counterarguments to vegetarianism and veganism.

However, I just have to say, that watching/hearing him expand on his own "thinking" without a script or editors, it was both just not pretty and frequently astonishingly idiotic. Don't get me wrong here, there are good arguments countering the vegetarian/vegan ones, it's just that Tyson didn't hit even a single one of them - instead he kept going on about plants' feelings, baby vegetable infanticides, theoretical sentient space aliens, and the like. Another not-so-great look for him, and an illustrative example of how scientists and academics are probably better off generally staying in their proverbial lane.