By Marcus Chown and Govert Schilling. Faber and Faber 2011
A pleasant looking blue book about 150mm x 200mm with 300 pages in quite thick paper. Good clear font, plenty of room between the lines. Physically an excellent production.
It is like a book of quotations inasmuch as it is all short paragraphs, one or two sentences, say.
There are fourteen chapters ranging from 'The Sky', 'The Earth', 'The Moon', to such as 'The Universe', 'Life in The Universe' and 'Seeing The Universe'.
It fills you up with facts about these subjects that generally are arranged to increase your knowledge in some substantial way rather than just provide unrelated 'interesting' facts.
Here's a sample of how the little paras change their nature from stuff we probably all know to a fact we possibly didn't to what amounts to merely human 'chatter' :
During the red giant phase, Sun will be profligate with its heat. Eventually it will cool and shrink down to a super-dense 'white dwarf'.
A white dwarf is about the size of the Earth ( a sugar of its matter would weigh like a heavy family car). It's a stellar ember, cooling and fading into invisibility.
The Sun, in the words of poet T.S.Eliot, will end 'not with a bang but a whimper'.
It is a very good book. Gives a quick respectable overview of this wide range of subjects.