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Explaining the wild, weird, wonderful spacetime we inhabit Brian Greene admits that his own mother complained that his first book, "The Elegant Universe," gave her a headache. It's tempting to be churlishly inappropriate and quip that this book should finish her off. "The Fabric of the Cosmos" is no easier to get through, but the patient reader will soon appreciate that it expands the mind more than it hurts the brain. Greene's purpose is an overlapping twofold: explain what exactly makes up space and time and present how scientific progress seems to be heading closer to a unified theory of everything. As to this latter point: even if we have a theory of everything we admittedly won't know all that much. Instead, a unified theory is more accurately described as a successful reconciliation of the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, a resolution that is currently the holy grail of scientists and Nobel committees. Those folks who make a habit of reading general science books won't find much new here, although Greene's chapter explaining branes and braneworlds is the clearest and most accessible I've read on the subject. What Greene has going for him, though, is a great sense of humor and an innate ability to transform the most complex theory into a cute (and sometimes, perhaps, too cute) story. Even more important, Greene is willing to share both his excitement for his discipline (string theory) and his "gut feelings" about what scientists are likely to discover going forward, an enthusiasm that conveys both the turmoil of discovery and the mutability of science. The one major disappointment is the book's illustrations. Part of this is not Greene's fault: the ink prints too heavily on the uncoated stock used by the publisher, and some of the before-and-after renderings are barely indistinguishable. Many illustrations are printed too small. Others don't adequately portray the events they are supposed to demonstrate. Since his text relies on the presentation of these drawings and photographs, it's too bad that it's so hard to make some of them out. Nobody will mistake Greene's book for a page-turning thriller; it's best if one digests one chapter at a sitting and allows time for rereading some of the more complicated ideas. Our microcosmic fabric of our universe is plenty weird enough to provide material for 500 pages of exploration and discovery, and it's impossible to come away from this book thinking of space or time--or life--in the same way.