If you find A Brief History of Time rough going, try Hawking's newer and more readable The Universe in a Nutshell.

My review begins with a limerick, and then continues,

In the foreword to The Universe in a Nutshell, Stephen Hawking admits that the success of A Brief History of Time "was remarkable for a book that was not easy going."

That is an understatement. Despite critical acclaim for the accesibility of its writing, the complexity and counter-intuitiveness of its subject matter probably made Professor Hawking's earlier book one of the least read best-sellers in history.

He resisted requests to write a follow-up, he states, because he didn't want to write a sequel. Fortunately for those who are ready to grapple again with the curvature of space-time, the uncertainty principle, a quantum theory of gravity, evaporating black holes, and multidimensional string theory (sometimes referred to as the theory of everything), the professor who holds the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics once occupied by Sir Isaac Newton "[came] to realize that there is room for a different kind of book that might be easier to understand."

Fred Bortz -- Science and technology books for young readers (www.fredbortz.com) and Science book reviews (www.scienceshelf.com)