Full disclosure: this review is not of the first book I finished in 2025. Part of the reason for that is because it didn’t grab me as much as I’d hoped. In theory I figured it might be kind of funny to start off the new year with popular science book on the beginning and the ending of our universe, The Little Book of Cosmic Catastrophes (That Could End the World). Basically, it’s astronomy with some physics in relatively common language.
The first section covers theories on how the universe got started, and how our solar system and planet might have initially formed (“What Could Have Happened”). The second section covers various proposed possibilities for the end of the planet and maybe universe (“What Could Still Happen”), and the third covers things that as far as current thinking goes are virtually guaranteed to happen (“What Will Happen”) to end life as we know it on Earth and/or Earth itself, and maybe the rest of the galaxy too. There’s a lot of possibilities and theories, some known (asteroids, moons, solar flares, galaxy merges, black holes, etc.) and some that were newer to me, such as the possible importance of Jupiter in such questions. There’s a little bit of science history added in as well.
Generally it’s an interesting read but the narrative is a problem, for me at least. Reason one is that I hadn’t noticed that there are symbols used to designate the theoretical likelihood of events, which is related to reason two, namely how the images are included in the information. The images are actually not just artwork illustrations, most of the time they are part of the content and if you don’t catch things in the intended order, it either disrupts the flow of ideas or you miss something and the reasoning suddenly gets unclear. The general style is pretty conversational, which is fine, although that does mean that some points don’t get much explanation (like the author’s definitive opinion of the status of Pluto).
Overall this isn’t a bad read by any means, but I was just wishing for a little more something.