Learning more about stars, black holes and dark matter is a great part of the fun in this book, but I don't think it's the most important lesson I take from it. Its Epistemological approach, its theory of how we know and learn things, is fascinating. First of all, by insisting on the question "how do they know that?", feeding this scientific curiosity. It then lays down its scheme of three universes: the perceived, the detected and the theoretical and how they interact with each order while we explore the nature of the universe itself. By setting this scenario, it guides us on presenting the most intriguing phenomena of astronomy and cosmology while also explaining how the experiments were performed to verify theories or how new measurements set new theories forward. I have a background in engineering which helped me comprehend the physics and little mathematical details covered by the authors, but I believe that any motivated layperson might enjoy the reading. It satiated my curiosity about how dark matter and dark energy became a topic of studies but also gave me tools on how to deal with scientific communication of daily life.
POSTED AT AMAZON 2009 I think, it is a true popular book among plethora of great but less-popular-more science oriented attempts by prominent cosmologists/physicists. Science at work - this is what we learn here; what we know for sure (how our Sun and stars "live" is particularly unique example of what science is capable to achieve), what we know because models are created based on observations and what are just hypothesis on a border of s-f waiting to be proven by experiments, adequate way of detecting (or both). I recommend this very approachable title mostly to high school students who contemplate studying astronomy or astrophysics in the future.