By the end of the 1970s, the Standard Model of elementary particles and their interactions was substantially complete. In the years that followed, experimental physicists used high-energy particle accelerators to detect the particles predicted by the StandardModel. TheW± and Z0 bosons, for example, were discovered in 1983. The Higgs boson, however, proved to bemore elusive. Close devotes his last two chapters to CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the gargantuan proton-proton collider assembled at great cost in a twenty-seven kilometer ring tunneled under France and Switzerland near Geneva. All throughout his book, Close handles the crucial interplay between theory and experiment adroitly. As his story winds down, he turns his attention to a new component of highenergy physics: the political machinations needed to secure funding for the colossal new machines essential to experimental physics.