How it Began is a whimsical exploration of the cosmos through the power of the author’s imagination. The book is informative, but I sometimes had difficulty perceiving where the author was setting his imaginary person. I believe at one point the author’s avatar was floating through space, far enough away from our Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxies to be able to see them both. Thankfully, these sections are put in italics so you can tell when he is imagining the scene.

So initially, Chris Impey talks about the formation of our Solar System and how we came to find out about it. Impey talks about the Moon, how we can speculate its origins but not know them, and other planetary bodies that we might be able to reach. Of course from an engineering perspective, we are really far from being able to reach any other area of the Solar System other than the Moon. This is because space is really vast and mostly made up of empty space. However, I digress; Europa is one of Jupiter’s Moons and is thought to have liquid water. Impey talks about other places we might be interested in as well, but it would require a lot of effort and scientific advances to make it hospitable to our species.

Since the book is called How It Began I figured it would discuss the Big Bang and in that sense, I was not disappointed. It is a sort of wash rinse repeat situation with how it talks about the Cosmic Microwave Background, Dark Matter, Dark Energy, the theory of General Relativity, the theory of Special Relativity, and so on. Impey doesn’t leave many stones unturned when he discusses Cosmology.

The book flows well and is usually easy to follow and understand. The only real problem I had was with the aforementioned imaginary scenes. They threw me off and initially bothered me. Eventually, I got used to them and came to appreciate them. ( )

The author is highly knowledgeable and makes an effort to explain the material to a varied audience. I learned a good deal about astrophysics. The author often explains about environments by imagining himself in the for example in a black hole. I enjoyed the book but it is not an easy book to truly understand. ( )

Ostensibly a book on the beginnings of everything, to contrast with Impey's _How It Ends_ (2010) having been on the endings of everything, but really a general survey of astronomy and cosmology. As such, it holds its own against the numerous comparable works and, of course, has the advantage of being up-to-date as of 2012. Late in the book we learn that Impey is "skeptical but grateful" in regard to fine-tuning arguments and grants "tenuous epistemological status" to the multiverse idea.