Customer Reviews

Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time: A Reader's Companion

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I'm only sixteen and before I read this book I knew very little about space. With this book I was even able to prove my chemistry teacher wrong on several occasions, one dealing with nuclear force. This book is excellent for anyone looking to expand their knowledge on how we came to be.

Stephen Hawking's a Brief History of Time: A Reader's Companion was a time stoppingly good book. It made me think on a higher level about the universe, black holes, and time. Much of this information, like the fact that black holes give off radiation, I had not yet begun to comprehend in the far reaches of my younge mind. Stephen Hawking, unlike most people of his brain power (if there are any people with brain power equal to his), made his words in a form that even the most common of Joes could understand every atom of what he was trying to say. I recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn more about time and how it effects the universe and its black holes. I hope everyone likes it as muck as I do. Thank you and, Stephen, keep up the good work.

This is the BEST book I have ever read. I had never ever known astronomy in such a detail. I was able to impress my physics teacher by asking questions that brought even her in utter chaos and by answering some questions that were meant for 12th grader and above. You will start digesting astronomy after readin it!

This book is not "A Brief History of Time" or any kind of sequel: it's something different. It's a "companion" (a kind of marketing spin-off) to the TV feature-documentary of Hawking's life, work and struggle against ALS. The book contains contributions from family, friends and professional colleagues filling out details the great man's bio and the evolution of his ideas, together with photos of said folks and of Hawking's life from childhood to the date of publication. It is not a serious book about astrophysics, though short vignettes summarising the various theories discussed in ABHOT are included throughout the book in italicised print, to distinguish them from the main text and to illustrate how Hawking developed his views over the years up to the date of the film documentary. Hawking himself says in the introduction that it's "The book of the film of the book."

As such, it's hard to recommend unless you're interested in having a celebrity-bio type book of Stephen Hawking's life-story which introduces some of the more esoteric concepts in astrophysics such as singularities and quantum theory in a more episodic and "Reader's Digest" format.

The first hardcover printing was an enormous run of 250,000, and you can pick one up for almost nothing - though you'd be better off reading the original text of ABHOT, especially the illustrated edition, or some of Hawking's more recent works like "The Universe in a Nutshell" or "The Grand Design".