Bob Berman’s entertainingly kinetic book “Zoom” arrives within an electric red cover that ricochets with lightning. A columnist for Astronomy magazine who favors the handle Skyman Bob, he transmits science geekery in vivid prose stuffed with unexpected insights and arresting observations.

“Zoom” examines speeds of all kinds, from the spooky stasis of absolute zero (or 459.67 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, where even atoms stall. “You can’t go any slower than stopped,” Mr. Berman writes), through conventionally fast (a bounding cheetah) and on to superfast, light speed and even beyond — possible because the universe’s ever-accelerating expansion pulls the most distant galaxies away at such a clip that their light stands no chance of ever getting here.

The book’s tour of tempos covers locations and subjects as diverse as the observatories perched on high peaks in Chile’s bone-dry Atacama Desert; the hurricane-force winds of Mount Washington and Mount McKinley; the inner workings of lightning and auroras; and even sap’s variable speed as it rises from root to branch. . . .