Normally books of this type spend a profound amount of time on history of failed ideas sometimes taking up three quarters of the body. This gives such piffle maybe a dozen pages and only to the extent that it is necessary to say who the first person to thought of the notion of non-time or the size of the universe. The heft of the text is going over our best guesses of the origin of the universe and attacking the hegemony of the big bang. The author recognizes the efficacy, predictive power, and accuracy of the big bag theory but also goes over in reasonable detail other possible explanations. He clearly points out the threads of evidence and points out the shortfalls of each in much more clarity than anything I've ready previously. The author clearly indicates which ideas are hypotheses, aids to conceptualization, models or possible emerging theories with a keen eye towards the nature of the scientific method.

The author spends sometime talking about how cosmological ideas develop and includes abandoned ideas that were never disproved but merely fell out of favor.

The book is an amazing overview of the current state of cosmology indicating where scientists and theoreticians are working and spends no effort to put on a "unified front" as many texts on cosmology do. If you're comfortable with cosmology on any level I think you may find this book enjoyable.