The Washington Post We are living in the golden age of astronomy, and how frustrating it is. We see pretty Pathfinder pictures of Mars, and even more glorious Hubble pictures of distant galaxies. There is the occasional breathless story in the newspapers reporting, say, that the universe is 5 billion years younger than previously thought, and we are supposed to make sense of this. But, in fact, those outside the scientific priesthood have as little real understanding of the new discoveries about the state of the universe as the average Florentine had about Galileo's discoveries about the laws of motion.
Books are almost as bad.
Books by scientists, on the other hand, tend to be incomprehensible. Indeed, once you start, it probably will be the only book you read, because it is meant to be read slowly. It has to be. It is a very rich meal. Nonetheless, Ferris renders it in a prose so lucid that you actually begin to understand.