Sean Carroll’s From Eternity to Here sets out to explain the nature of time, particularly what’s known as the “arrow of time,” the fact that we experience time as a flow in only one direction, from the past into the future. This is a daunting prospect, as just setting up the question requires a discussion of just about every important physics discovery of the 19th and 20th centuries. Carroll manages to make it all readable, though, and whether or not you end up agreeing with his preferred approach, you’ll leave the book with a clearer sense of the problems and the physics involved in the nature of time.