An enjoyable book covering a wide range of topics. Roughly half of the essays are to do with science, and the rest are miscellaneous, with such topics as Sherlock Holmes, New York City, and the struggle of the author's wife with breast cancer. As much as I enjoy science communication, generally the miscellaneous articles are slightly more successful here I think - not because of any inherent flaw in the science communication (although, being published some decades ago, some of the information the book contains is outdated or even occasionally wrong) - but because there's a lot more overlap and repetition in the science essays. If Asimov has written three essays on the same topic, for instance, all three are included here and while each has a different approach, with different emphases, there is nonetheless substantial covering of the same ground, and this happens several times. Notable also, if a trifle sad, are Asimov's predictions of the space-based industries which he thought might be up and running by now. Alas, no lunar colony as yet... although the essay on what the sky would look like from a colony on the moon might be the best of the bunch.