This is a well written, well organized book on the Large Hadron Collider that is now operating at CERN. The five chapter titles pretty much tell you what you'll get out of the book: (1) What We Know: The Standard Model; (2) What We Guess: Theories We Want to Test; (3) How We Do It: The Large Hadron Collider; (4) How We See It: The Enormous Detectors; and (5) Where We're Going: The Big Picture, the Universe, and the Future.

It is written by a practicing physicist who writes well and uses lots of diagrams. About half of the book is "new" in that it focuses on the technical and engineering aspects of the LHC and isn't repeated in lots of other popular science books. The other half of the book is a review of the standard model and other theories the LHC is expected to test. These are somewhat terse and not hugely in depth but well presented and focused and directed very much towards the issues that the LHC will be able to explore.

Notably, while the book goes through supersymmetry, preons (the hypothesized particles that make up quarks), various speculations on dark energy, MACHOs, WIMPs, etc., the phrase "string theory" does not appear once in the book itself (it is in one of the quotes in Leon Lederman's excellent preface). Which tells you something about its relationship to experiment.