The Crowded Universe follows the (American) search for planets outside the solar system from 1995 to the launch of Kepler in 2009 in great detail, offering a lot of interesting facts on a topic that's endlessly fascinating, and getting into the personal and political conflicts connected with it...

So why just the two stars in a book that literally contains millions of them? Well, I'm not going to claim to be fair, and Boss obviously knows more about the subject than I ever would even if I spent the rest of my life studying it. But the fact remains, something this interesting shouldn't be this, well, dull. I don't really mind that he occasionally goes off-topic to rant about politics (noting that the only way to get the GWB administration to pay for the budget they needed would have been to let the P in Terrestrial Planet Finder stand for Petroleum), because at least then he sounds like he's actually invested in it. The US-centricism is a bit annoying as well, but I guess the book is basically intended as a letter to Obama asking for more cash before the Europeans beat NASA to, I dunno, landing on a comet or something. (And yes, the endless harping on about NASA budget processes gets tiring.) It's written exclusively from an astrophysicist's point of view - it's about the search for a way to find habitable worlds, more than the question of what might be on the actual planets - which is also fine. But I think the book's major problem is that he's chosen to write it as a journal, going through findings and theories day by day, returning to the same arguments over and over every time someone publishes a new article, rather than trying to summarize what was known when the book was written. How we learn something is always important to teach, but for most of the time in this book, I find myself waiting for the other shoe to drop. Instead, the book spends so much time mired in minutiae you never get an overview of just why this topic is so important.

Milhouse: Do any of these boxes contain candy?
Factory owner: No. We only make boxes to ship nails. Any other questions?
Martin: When will we see a finished box, sir?
Factory owner{chuckles}: We do not do that here. That is done in Flint, Michigan.
Bart: Has anyone lost their hand in the machinery?
Factory owner: No, that has never happened.
Bart: And then the disembodied hand suck out and starting strangling people?
Factory owner: I do not know what factory you are talking about! We only make boxes.