"In an elegant, pristine universe black holes are decidedly messy. Apprentice physicists may try to sweep them under the cosmic carpet and hope no one notices the lump. The masters, like Hawking, relish the messy bits, the structure of space-time, the "no-boundary" concept, the baby universe. Larsen makes such messy bits, and Hawking's expertise in straightening them out, accessible to general readers and sets the concepts within the framework of Hawking's career and personal life. As a result, along with explanations of the theory of everything we learn why Hawking turns up so much in the media as one of the greatest and certainly one of the most easily described physicists on the planet."--Review.

"With a new Afterword"--Cover.