this is one of those books that is indispensable not because it is comprehensive or groundbreaking, but because it brings the reader into the center of the science it describes. by turns skeptical or tendentious, expansive or selective, the reader is given the recent history of cosmology (including thumbnail portraits of some of the major protagonists, such as zwicky), the development of concepts and evidence, the major interpretations of the evidence with their residual questions and mysteries, and finally a review of some future proposed space and earth observatories. the narrative begins with "a cosmological cartoon" (cartoon here meaning "sketch") that lays out the key elements -- red shift, relativity, large scale structure and microwave background -- then builds cumulatively to a theory of how galaxies form from stars and gas, and evolve a variety of forms, clusters and interactions. attention is directed to the various forms of observational bias that distort out understanding of what and how much is really out there, and popular glamor topics (such as black holes) take a back seat to the effort to understand the universe as an evolving ecology of enormous dimensions. all in a book that can be easily completed in a week of evenings.