Origins has taken me forever, for a variety of reasons. But that doesn't matter, since I have finished at last and can review it. Hopefully my next review won't be so long in coming. It'll be A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, which... Well, it's a rival for The Woman Warrior in terms of density and ridiculousness. I am also reading it for school (as an independent novel choice).
Starting at the fascinating, confusing beginning of light and energy and going up to the modern search for extraterrestrial life, Tyson and Goldsmith explore every stage of our origins. Humans originated from earlier life forms, which originated from earth, which originated from dust around our sun, which originated from the fallout of dead stars, which originated from the earliest density fluctuations in matter, which originated from (something we don't quite know yet but for now let's just say QUANTUM MECHANICS OKAY), which originated from the ultimate (as far as we know!) origin: the beginning of our universe. Combining many fields of science, Origins covers the history of the universe from dark energy to Darwin in a way that relates to humans but does not quite place us at the center of the universe.