Doctor Gamow, along with Arthur Clarke, is the New Science's liveliest, most ncent popularizer. His current opus, an extension of his 20 year old classic Biography of the Earth, is a fast-moving, far-ranging, very much au courant interpretation of the latest, flashiest forays into astrophysics, geophysics and biochemistry; the information's exact, the readability's intense; in its pages, then, the layman can exult. With a magician's ease and also a magician's talent for surprise, Doctor Gamow investigates the earth's age, the theories of planetary origins, the various spheres: tropo, strato, iono and the brand new magnetosphere or ""empty space"", seismologist Mohorovicic's discontinuity principle better known now as the Mohole Project or deep-ocean drilling, the Van Allen radiation belts and the Earth-Sun electromagnetic relationship, the reciprocal Earth-Moon gravitational force, the earth's changing face through tectonic activity and erosion, the mountain-building epochs via the ""book of sediments"", etc. He also appends a few future-glimmers: Earth's got 5 billion years to go but we as a species won't be around that long. Its likely life flourishes on billions of other Milky Way planets but interstellar communication seems unlikely; the secret of controlled thermonuclear reactions is the next breakthrough in the evolving atomic revolution. A handy guide.