I like this book. It starts out going over the science of comets, then covers the history of comet encounters. After that the book devoted a lot of space to describing different dust and ion tails on various comets, complete with many photos to illustrate the text. The text then goes into some of the less common topics such as the various light curves seen and the spin of the nucleus. Finally, since comets are a fundamental part of the solar system, the book covers the origin of the solar system as shown by comet history and research. Althugh published almost 30 years ago, the book is still pretty good. Current scientific beliefs concerning comets are still what is told in this book, the only difference being we now have photos of comet nuclei and data on the chemistry of the dust tails which back up what is in the book. ( )