Marcia Bartusiak

A good history of astronomy from the late 19th century to the 1930s that discusses the discovery of the true significance of spiral nebulae, the size of the universe and its expansion. Other advances during this time, e.g. the nature and classification of stars, are mostly not discussed. Many later misconceptions about who did what are debunked, and there is fascinating discussion of the people involved with no attempt to gloss over their often too human characteristics.

This was a terrific book.
Easy to read and understand.
Chock full of interesting people, theories, times, and information.
Seeing how it all comes together, one theory to the next, was fascinating.

This book is a fantastic, popular-science history of a pivotal era in astronomy: the moment in time when we went from a belief that the Milky Way was the Universe entire, to the knowledge that the Milky Way is but one galaxy in a Universe comprising billions of others.

Both the famous names (Hubble, Einstein, etc) and the less well-known players (Vesto Slipher, Milton Humason, Georges Lemaître, etc) are represented in this fascinating, well-written, and well-researched book.

It would seem to me that this simply written collection is mainly suitable for people who have never read anything else on astronomy. Two other things to know beforehand are that (1) eight of Bartusiak's 32 chapters are reprints of articles published in other places quite a few years ago and that (2) one of her purposes is to highlight the contributions of female astronomers and the special difficulties they faced.