A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson, 2003

I loved this book.  Written with humor, an appropriate mixture of awe and skepticism, mixing science with fascinating personal stories as only Bryson can do, interspersing tales of folly, error, and deceit with amazing intuition, hard work, and good fortune, Bryson takes us on a journey from the subatomic to the cosmos, from 14.5 billion years ago to today (or at least ten years ago), and touches on the great scientific discoveries that characterize man’s anthropic universe (see Krause above).