I enjoyed this book and was keen to pick it back up when I got the opportunity. I'm swithering between 3 and 4 stars as whilst it certainly got me thinking on several occasions there were also bits that seemed a little confusing or almost missing. However it was well enough written and as I say thought provoking and certainly worth a read.
I was a little confused as to the British references though and wondered if it'd been edited for our market a little even though that wasn't indicated in the book. The author doesn't seem to have spent time in the UK but the examples seem too idiosyncratic to be what one would expect an American to pick up. ( )

a very fun read about the science of cosmology and culture. the author give the history of how the culture and science viewed time. he talks about the future of cosmology. he explore the possibility of knowing what there was before the big bang. ( )

Overly broad effort to synthesize a massive body of scholarship (astrophysics, cosmology, anthropology, cultural studies, etc.) for popular consumption--fascinating bits but unavoidably superficial. ( )

This was an interesting book that covers a lot of the basics of cosmology. It uses an approach I liked, but that I'm not sure others will appreciate as much. Each chapter is introduced with a (mostly fictional, but not entirely) vignette describing some characters point of view and how it is influenced by the then predominant view of time. Most of what I read (heard, really, as I listened to this in audiobook form) was familiar material. One additional comment I will make is that this book could very easily fit into a big history style approach to viewing our cosmos. For the most part I suspect it would be approachable by any sufficiently interested high school students, so I hope it has been considered for such an endeavor. ( )

This is an inspiring tour through the history of how humans have envisioned and defined time through the ages. Also, how the concept of time is connected to how we view the beginnings of our universe and how the latest theories in cosmology will send us all in new directions. You will not look at a clock in the same way. ( )