What is truly magical about Magic Universe is Calder's incredible breadth. Migrating birds, light sensors in the human eye, black holes, antimatter, buckyballs and nanotubes — with exhilarating sweep, Calder can range from the strings of a piano to the superstrings of modern physics, from Pythagoras's theory of musical pitch to the most recent ideas about atoms and gravity and a ten-dimensional universe — all in one essay. The great virtue of this wide-ranging style — besides its liveliness and versatility — is that it allows Calder to illuminate how the modern sciences intermingle and cross-fertilize one another. Indeed, whether discussing astronauts or handedness or dinosaurs, Calder manages to tease out hidden connections between disparate fields of study. What is most wondrous about the "magic universe" is that one can begin with stellar dust and finish with life itself.