As many discovered in 1988, when superstar physicist Stephen Hawking published his first book, A Brief History Of Time, it's difficult to comment critically on abstract genius without looking like a concrete idiot. It's possible that the emperor has no clothes, but in Hawking's case, it's just as possible that the clothes in question are 10-dimensional constructs that can't be detected without a particle accelerator and a series of PhDs. So reviewers in 1988 gushed about how accessible Brief History's ideas were to the average, physics-impaired layman, and physics-impaired laymen by the millions rushed out to buy the book. But as Hawking himself laments in his new The Universe In A Nutshell, they mostly read the first few chapters and then set it aside in bewilderment. The Universe In A Nutshell is an even more reader-friendly attempt to approach those bewildered masses by lulling them into complacency with short sentences, Star Trek jokes, and hundreds of colorful, simplistic, and sometimes irrelevant illustrations, and then teaching them about the theoretical world of superstrings, fermions, imaginary time, and p-branes. The results are well-meaning but uneven; Hawking writes more approachably than ever when talking about relativistic thought or the exponential growth of technological development, but his attempts to reduce complex equations and thought experiments into definitive descriptions are often baffling and frustrating. When discussing Einstein, Hawking carefully spells out the history of relativity, how it evolved and changed in the scientific community, and what schools of thought dominate today. But when discussing his own work, he often presents it as contextless fact, declaring "what" without addressing "why." While his target audience would be far more bewildered by the equations that support his theories, it's still difficult to know what to do with glib, pat declarations like, "The cosmic string spacetime contains matter that has positive energy density and is consistent with the physics we know. However, the warping that produces the time loops extends all the way out to infinity in space and back to the infinite past in time." Hawking does clearly define his terms for the novice, so such statements are at least parseable. But more perspective and explanation, and fewer cute-alien cartoons, would have made Nutshell both easier to follow and easier to swallow.