Not a bad book by any means, but kind of a frustrating one: I expected a bit more rigor from Harrison, whose *Cosmology* is a very good text. I was less than happy with his coverage of ancient views of the Universe, and found the central theme of the puzzle of the dark night sky swamped a bit by a thumbnail history of astronomy. The book feels padded - I wish he had spent more time with each of the "solutions" to the dark sky riddle and less time on general astronomy - for which there are many good books. Finally, the editing (and proofreading) is pretty bad in places. The book winds up feeling a little like a rush job. ( )