Universe

Buy it! This is DK at their best. I've panned a DK Atlas recently (gorgeous graphics ruined by brain-dead binding). This book revives my respect for this publisher. The pictures are not full-page for the most part but there are many of them and all are gorgeous and all are surrounded with logically laid out explanations of the Universe from Earth out to forever. Oddly, it seems at first, there are over 150(!) pages of constellation and sky charts at the end of the book (starting after over 300 pages have gone by). Normally such a thing would be visually uninteresting except as a practical guide to star-gazing. And compared to the preceeding 330 pages, that's true, for me anyway. But flipping throught the pages, I felt inspired to (someday) go out and buy a really good telescope and use their charts to find the features highlighted on many of the pages. It's enticing. They sometimes show you a little inset photo of some marvelous nebula or galaxy or the like and then show you where to find such. Buy it! It's both coffee-table wonderful and highly educational. A serious but accessible work that way.

Years ago I used to love going to the library and thumbing through the Time-Life Science and Nature series. It has always been a disappointment that the Time-Life folks failed to provide an updated edition. But hats off and deep bows to DK publishing for this volume--the pictures alone are staggering but the quality of the writing takes the work to MUST own status. I can't help but think that if more of these had been laying around my home I may have managed to avoid the trap of law school and made something of myself. The science is carefully explained at various levels in a graphically-dense format that allows readers of pretty much all backgrounds to find something interesting and useful. I find the volume particularly necessary here in Southern California, where many seem to possess a Ptolemaic sense that the world revolves around us. In the opening chapter there is a graphic that shows the structure of the Universe progress through orders of magnitude beginning with the solar system and ending up with a map of the universe containing great filaments consisting of superclusters of galaxies--mind blowing stuff. This book succeeds precisely because it convinces its reader to independently pursue the subject. It certainly got me out to look at the couple dozen or so stars/planets (and that Moon thing) visible from my LA-area backyard.

DK has been putting out this sort of high end "picture book" for a number of years now, but this is the first one I've seen that really packs the information in on every page. Some of their past titles look great but turn out to be rather light and fluffy on actual information once you get past the pictures. But this book abounds with both gorgeous images and a sufficient amount of textual information that it goes beyond anything they've done before. Browsing through this (very large) book, I repeatedly came across pages where I said to myself "ok, I need to own this book if only for that page". I would highly recommend this book for anyone interested in the Universe (hopefully that's everyone :-) and definitely as an educational book for kids. Another thing that sold me is that the overall editor of the book is Sir Martin Rees, who I greatly admire as a cosmologist and humanist. All his books are worth reading as well. So, this one gets my highest recommendation, and I think you'll really enjoy it. G.

This book jumped off the shelf and into my arms, begging me to look through it. Boy, am I glad I did. Astronomy and Space is a hobby of mine, and even I was struck with awe when I began zipping through the pages. If you want a book to tell you about almost every facet of astronomy there is, this is the book. It has enough information to explain a concept, but not too much so you get overloaded with "astronomy-ese." It's also loaded with pictures, in typical DK fashion. And some of the pictures are awesome too, because the Hubble Space Telescope is the originator of some of the pictures and, thanks to NASA, we have Hubble as a fabulous window to our Universe. I don't think your budding astronomer would be disappointed if you bought him/her this book for the upcoming holidays or for a birthday, etc. Or, be like me and buy one for yourself!!!

I loved this book. It is a great coffee table book that will impress anyone who is into science, and if they aren't, they might just like it because the pics. It includes lots of pictures, and diagrams, and it is layed out so perfectly that even an 8 year old could enjoy it. I love DK, and I have at least 12 books of theirs.