It seems this book is best if you read some small excerpts. I tried to read the whole book but I found the author to be a little too full of himself to make the book enjoyable.
But it helps that I've personally known very smart people with that same dry style of humor. Whose self-assurance was completely justified. I therefore read it as not pretentious, but as understated.
It helps that the actual content could only have been written by someone who genuinely was extremely smart.
The stories about Clark hearing that <scientist X> was working on <project Y> openly when they had already worked on classified <project Y>, so they had to get Y declassified quickly so they could scoop X were particularly unappealing.