Book Review  by Michael DiMario
Take Me To Your Leader, Perspectives On Your First Alien Encounter by Neil DeGrasse Tyson
Publisher: Simon Six – Simon & Schuster
Publication Date: 2026
Total Pages: 240
$18.18, Hardcover on Amazon

Take Me to Your Leader by Neil DeGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium, is a fun and easy read on human kind’s Alien expectations of first, second, and third encounter. Tyson explains and throttles our expectations based on the laws of physics to describe what Aliens might look like, act, how they would travel through the vastness of space, and what their expectations of us may be.

What I enjoyed most in the book is a discussion of human hubris setting our expectations. Historical facts and human origins are discussed as well as fun facts such as humans and bananas share 25% of exact DNA sequence (usually 60% is quoted, but this is DNA functionality vs actual sequence) revealing all life on Earth has a common ancestor and that the great banana split occurred about 1.5 billion years ago. This leads to what possibly could an Alien be like?