The author of The Birth and Death of the Sun once again succeeds in presenting abstract scientific facts in so human and entertaining a way that one reads with avid curiosity his marshalling of the known and assumed facts concerning the source of earth, moon, the possibilities of life elsewhere in the universe; the assumptions concerning what goes on below the earth's surface; a reconstruction of the history of continents, oceans, mountains, the story told by sedimentation; the origin of life. When all is said and done, human history seems relatively unimportant.