»A Briefer History of Time

Stephen Hawking presents an illustrated, clarified version of his A Brief History of Time. This edition presents the enthralling concepts of particle physics, general relativity, quantum mechanics, and other concepts understood by fewer than a dozen people throughout the space-time continuum.

I do love a book in which the author describes physical laws through narration, rather than through explicit derivation of equations. (One exception to this is David Flannery's excellent examination of the square root of two.)
Hawking's presentation falls back a little too easily on a Creator, and does not strongly suggest that physics can indeed solve all problems — as I know it does. Hawking describes moments in which he falls back to the notion of non-physical intervention, specifically at the outset of the creation of this universe. After all, how does one explain the presence of energy that became the matter of our universe? What is the answer to "What came before the Big Bang?"

The illustrations in this edition struck me as kitsch, which at some level is appropriate for a discussion of cosmology, but ultimately distracted me from the useful passages in the text itself.