text: I must say my first reaction was to be surprised at how much better Hawking is at explaining modern physics than my college instructors were.  Heisenberg's uncertainty principle was just an equation I learned.  Hawking made it seem like common sense.
  
  Hawking tries a little too hard to be witty at times (and punctuates all of his jokes with exclamation points! just in case you missed them!), but all-in-all, this was a quite readable account of what's presently known about cosmology.  I use the term "presently" guardedly, as just recently there was some big finding about dark matter (it exists!), but from now on, when there are new findings in physics, I want Hawking to explain them to me, because I feel like then I might understand them.  That's why you should read this book. 
  
  The reason you should not read this book is because you have no interest in wrestling with abstractions with which you will never interact in daily life, and would rather read about global warming or Darfur or something a bit more topical and practical.  This was still a hard read, and I feel like I grasped maybe 80% of it.  For you to decide, but for a former engineering student, this was something I wish I had read when I was taking physics
  