Frank Wilczek, co-recipient of the 2004 Nobel Prize in physics for the concept of asymptotic freedom in the strong force, has integrated several of his public lectures from recent years into the book, The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces (official website).
The book's central idea, as reflected in the title, is that the ordinary matter we see around us derives from "quarks and gluons that are themselves massless (or nearly so)" (p. 129). Quantum mechanical processes preclude a zero-energy state and, voila, via E = mc^2 (or, what Wilczek jokingly refers to as Einstein's "Second Law," m = E/c^2) we get mass (pp. 130-131).
A second major theme of the book is the nature of "empty space" or what historically has been referred to as the "aether" or "ether" (see Brian Greene's 2004 book, The Fabric of the Cosmos, for background discussion). Wilczek presents his own conception of space, which he calls the Grid.
The Lightness of Being clocks in at a compact 200 pages (roughly). It thus has the advantage of being a quick, relatively easy read. However, there were topics (such as symmetry groups) that I wished had been fleshed out in greater depth. Nevertheless, I felt there were helpful discussions of the following areas:
*The nature and practice of scientific theorizing.
*Anecdotes about Wilczek's meetings with Richard Feynman and other famous physicists.
*The original formulation of Planck units.
*The formulation of Higgs physics in terms of superconductivity.
*Lattice Quantum Chromodynamics, a computationally intensive analytic tool for the interactions of quarks and gluons.
In other areas, particularly grand unification theories (even encompassing gravity) and supersymmetry, I found Wilczek to be more optimistic than many other writers. Accordingly, I would have expected some consideration of the sources of skepticism toward these ideas (i.e., empirical failures to find supportive evidence, thus far).
On the whole, The Lightness of Being is written in a lively manner and provides a good "light" overview of salient topics in contemporary physics.