I was really excited to read this book. I read his book from last year ('Astrophysics for People in a Hurry") and thoroughly enjoyed it. So when I saw that he was going to tie in Astrophysics to modern day war and tactics, I thought it would be a wonderful extension of the last book I read. Eh... not so much.

Reading the book was painfully slow and repetitive. For more than 150 pages, the most intricate device that tied war and astrophysics together was the telescope (and before that it was relaying signals across a battlefield by climbing tall trees). Then, we can fast forward to something more modern and talk about how space was to be the next tactical vantage point for countries, but we need 25 seemingly identical examples of how everyone needed to agree that space should really be kept neutral. I really had a hard time figuring out if I was just re-reading the same pages over and over again (good thing there are numbers at the top of each page to easily verify I wasn't... it just seemed that way).

There were a few interesting parts of the book, but in the end it just read like a series of newspaper articles strung together about the same topics. Needless to say, I was unimpressed and really struggled to get through this one. Perhaps his next book will mimic more of the approach of the first book I read by Tyson... but I'm much more skeptical now.