Christopher

The weird thing about this book is that the author explains how "fear mongers" use the media to mislead the public and thus promote their alarmingly conservative agenda. He then does an about-face and uses the EXACT SAME TECHNIQUES to explain why we should fear those things that liberals find scary.

As someone who isn't overly political, I found this book to be more silly (insofar as it contradicts itself) than intolerable.

This is a fun book and a okay reading, but there's a version on CD read by Dennis Franz that's a lot better. He's much more expressive.

According to Stephen Hawking's web site, he wrote the text many years ago, but the material it covers has already been published in his other books (such as 'A Brief History of Time'). He didn't have anything to do with the publishing of this book and anyone interested in his work would do better to get the books he actually intended to write. This one is largely unoriginal (and that's according to the so-called author -- who is still alive by the way).