A brilliant and accessibly written report on the current state of cosmology, from parallel universes to life on Mars. Cosmology has seized front page headlines remarkable regularly over the last 5 years, and the Whole Shebang provides an excellent background to the news stories, as well as to the ideas of leading scientists. The book takes the reader through all thecentral issues of the field, and the wide variety of breakthroughs of recent years: the inflationary universe immediately subsequent to the big bang, the discovery and significance of large scale galactic structure, the evolution of the universe and the many-worlds hypothesis of parallel universes.