This is a short book, but it is surprising for any astronomy book to be devoted to the narrow topic of supernovae. It starts with the basics but eventually gets to such recent ideas as electron-capture and pair-instability supernovae. The main text is popular-level but the author, being an active researcher in the field, provides plenty of technical-literature references in the endnotes. He hopes that "in ten years, twenty at most, this book will be woefully out of date."