"Each science," says the author of this gripping book, "has its heyday." The nineteen-thirties and -forties were the fateful years for atomic physics, while the fifties brought the revolution in biology. The sixties are the golden age of astronomy, likely to rank in future histories with the early sixteenth century, when Galileo and Kepler flourished. Pulsating radio sources (pulsars) and quasi-stellar objects (quasars), galaxies drastically re-evaluated, unimaginable violence in the far reaches of space, solar storms, the bombardment of earth by neutrinos, the strange whispers picked up by radio telescopes, the Big-Bang and Steady-State theories of cosmology, the birthdays and possible doomsdays of the earth and the sun and other stars, of the galaxy and the mighty universe itself -- these are the elements of astronomy today, that "giddy intellectual game for great telescopes and great minds." In this succinct, superbly written book, Nigel Calder follows the research path from the observatories of England, California, Princeton, and West Virginia to those of Canada, Puerto Rico, and Australia. The result, as felicitous in style as it is profoundly informed, is a miracle of compression and a thrilling vade mecum for man's efforts to draw a new and more vivid picture of the universe we inhabit.