“Despite the crazy title, this is an excellent popular account of string theory. As the astronomer Martin Rees writes in the foreword, ‘For aliens, string theory may be a doddle. But for most of us humans, they are a Himalayan challenge.’ So, this book is to be welcomed, not only for explaining the physics in an easily assimilated way, but also for articulating why superstrings and the rest of fundamental physics matter at all. This is something that physicists themselves rarely do. Best of all, Musser, a staff editor and writer at Scientific American, tackles the controversial aspects of string theory, which have been the subject of much journalistic nonsense lately, and gets it all just about right.”