content: The copy I read is the edition of Nagel and Newman's 1958 book revised in 2001 by Douglas Hofstadter, author in 1979 ofGödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. Nagel and Newman do a good job in their first six chapters of orienting the reader towards Gödel's proof, and give a clear overview of the proof in their detailed chapter seven. They don't overwhelm the beginner (for whom the book was written) with the painstaking details of the proof. They don't describe the construction of a formal language or discuss recursive functions. I think the book deserves its status as a classic of popular mathematics and I recommend it as a first look at Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems.For an accessible look at the historical background in mathematics and logic to Gödel's work, see Morris Kline'sMathematics: The Loss of Certainty. For a scholarly biography of Gödel, see John Dawson'sLogical Dilemmas: The Life and Work of Kurt Godel.