Eh. It might be quite useful as - as he suggests in the foreword - a classroom tool to spark interest and discussions. It's not terrible as a bathroom book - read one or two bits and move on. But reading through it was impossible (which is why it took me so long to finish). 100 separate little bits about discoveries - from radioactivity to General Relativity to seafloor spreading. The ones I knew something about, I found that his writeup was accurate if shallow (it had to be shallow, these are at most two pages of text each). The ones I knew nothing about were interesting while I was reading them, but I couldn't retain any information - I've forgotten all of them already (I had to really scrape to come up with three subjects for the sentence above, and they're all three things I knew something about previously). The bits were sorted by date, though that was surprisingly not obvious while I was reading - there were related bits that happened to come together, and others that didn't at all. It wasn't until after I finished reading and saw the sorted lists at the end - by field of science, and by name of discoverer - that I realized how the main text was sorted. The best possible sort isn't possible in a book - linked chains of related discoveries would have made all of them more interesting and valuable (and memorable, probably). Not bad, but not really worth my time reading. ( )