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This book was a mixed bag for me. Gaining any sense of perspective on humans' place in the universe should be a healthy exercise for all of us, and Tyson is to be applauded for encouraging us to step back from our myopic perceptions of our importance as a species and the smallness of our day to day concerns.

I enjoyed his challenges to rethink our assumptions about the world through thought experiments. How do you feel about your life circumstances at this moment? Given the option, would you prefer to be sent back to a prior time about which we know certain specific things, or forward into a future about which we can only make some educated guesses? That's a tough one for me; the future would seem to be the better choice, but then again there are those melting glaciers and expanding populations, and in this country, a seemingly intractable hotbed of political divisiveness and gun violence. Good food for thought.

Tyson is also arguably the G.O.A.T when it comes to reducing complex scientific or mathematical issues to terms that "lay" individuals can understand. But I question his assertion that scientific principals can be easily applied to research in psychology, sociology or anthropology, thus making obvious what should be the "rational" decisions in these areas. Often, empirical studies in these fields can only go so far without confirmation bias and other systemic problems creeping in.

Here's an example I'm familiar with: Are there health benefits to having pets in your home? Hard one to measure given confounds too extensive to list here, on top of which the researcher typically loves companion animals, as do the pet-owner participants in the study. It's easier to approach the question differently by evaluating the effects of interactions with pets under controlled circumstances (visits to residential facilities, e.g.) but even so, such studies are challenging to replicate while keeping all variables identical. So the theoretical question "Should pets be allowed in all shared residences such as apartment buildings because sharing a home with them bestows health benefits?" could not be answered on a rational basis. We really can't come up with a universal answer to that one.

The skepticism triggered by my own occasional mental digressions of this kind seeped through to other of his arguments. At times his examples seemed tortured in order to make his points.

I was also troubled by what appeared to be his complete dismissal of the value of studying, and learning from, history. It seems as if only that which can be evaluated and interpreted in the current moment has merit to him. What we think and feel can't help but feed into our assessment of what is rational in non-scientific areas. And what we think and feel is in some part determined by cultural heritage - and history.

With all that said, I found the book mentally stimulating, even if the stimulation took the form of counter-arguments to his assertions. It was much easier to discuss these things internally than to argue with individuals whose views I know to be contradictory to my own, rational or not. :-)