Book Review: The Manga Guide to the Universe

This is another one of the Manga Guide series from No Starch Press.

The review is way overdue because I received it around the same time as The Manga Guide to Physics and The Manga Guide to Relativity (review to come soon, I hope). Mine's the PDF version so the font is a bit small on my 6-inch Kindle.

The story follows a group of students from a drama club struggling to find a good ending to their performance. Their performance is based on an old Japanese story called the Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, where a bamboo cutter finds a child who happens to be from the moon. So the students seek to expand their knowledge of the universe to help finish their script.

At the end of each chapter is a more technical explanation which can be quite lengthy, like up to 12 pages of text with some diagrams, to elaborate on what the characters have learned. It's written for the layman, but can be quite dry sometimes. Unlike the Physics book, the nature of this subject that makes it quite hard to translate it totally into manga.

Despite the lengthy non-manga format explanation, I still enjoy reading the book very much. The universe is a very fascinating subject. I became more intrigued as I proceed on reading because there's so much interesting information, like the discovery new planets and galaxies, how gravity of the sun is so strong it can bend the path of light, the scale of space, the creation of space, etc.

At the end of the book, one can get a good idea of the cosmic universe, the progress human has made so far in space exploration and understanding. And yet there's still so much more we have yet to learn and discover about the universe.

The Manga Guide to the Universe is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | JP | CN)

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