A fun way to learn astronomy basics

The Manga Guide to the Universe (No Starch Press, 2011)
Authors: Kenji Ishikawa, Kiyoshi Kawabata, and Yutaka Hiiragi
Rating: Nine of Ten Stars

When a high school drama club is at risk of being disbanded, its members decide to stage a dramatic adaptation of a Japanese legend about a maiden who came to Earth from the Moon. This leads them to explore the science of celestial objects, space, and the physical universe as a whole (with some detours into folklore from around the world and multiversal theories).

"The Manga Guide to the Universe" is a fun and breezy way to learn the basics about astronomy while enjoying some light-hearted jokes about nerds, theater geeks, fan culture, and Japanese society along the way. The book is divided between comic book (manga) and pages of text. The comics portion follows the goofy high-schoolers and the science experts they consult about the mechanics of the solar system and the universe, while the text pages that go into the scholarly and scientific underpinnings of what they're told. Both the comic book portions and the text portions are clear and straight-forward in how they present the story and information, and they are further augmented with diagrams when needed. (I also really appreciate the fact that these books aren't tainted by the lazy translations that have been the norm for the past 15-20 years in the Japanese comics imports--the comics read left-to-right, front to back, as they should in a book presented in English.)

I  was given "The Manga Guide to the Universe" as a Christmas present, and I enjoyed it so much that I've gone ahead and ordered "The Manga Guide to Relativity" in hopes that I will finally have some of that information presented in a way that I can wrap my simple, BA-degrees holding mind around. I will let you all know if the Manga Guide crew was successful in edumacating me when the time comes!