On the Edge of the Sky
Trotta, Roberto. The Edge of the Sky: All You Need to Know About the All-There-Is. New York: Basic Books, 2014. pp. xvii + 85. eBook. $11.99.
This is a cool, experimental attempt to describe the state of the art in what we know about the universe, with the twist that Trotta uses only the thousand (the “ten hundred”) most common words in English. It’s about the best you could ask for under those constraints, but the vagueness the rules impose means there isn’t much here to hold onto; it lacks the emotional punch of other popular books on astronomy and cosmology.