Book excerpt: Starting from the foundations, the author presents an almost entirely self-contained treatment of differentiable spaces of nonpositive curvature, focusing on the symmetric spaces in which every geodesic lies in a flat Euclidean space of dimension at least two. The book builds to a discussion of the Mostow Rigidity Theorem and its generalizations, and concludes by exploring the relationship in nonpositively curved spaces between geometric and algebraic properties of the fundamental group. This introduction to the geometry of symmetric spaces of non-compact type will serve as an excellent guide for graduate students new to the material, and will also be a useful reference text for mathematicians already familiar with the subject.