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Wonderful. A book to savor Among the near flood of popular books on theoretical physics published the past decade, this one has become my favorite. It is marvelous--clear, fresh, funny, challenging, kind to the reader, and just plain beautiful. I've been a sucker for such books for a long time, although I've long since left the formal study of physics (which I majored in, many years ago). But I've read many of the recent crop of books in this genre--Hawking, Guth, Greene's Elegant Universe, Ferris's Whole Shebang, Penrose, and others. Among such worthwhile books, this book is a stand-out. I disagree with my fellow reviewer below who felt that this book represents only a rehash of Elegant Universe. It's much more than that. There's much more material. I also think that Greene's intent was to craft a forward-moving narrative that visits many of the dazzling paradoxes of physics. In this I think he succeeds. His narrative enlightens, surprises, and challenges in ways I haven't seen before. In fact, I was happy to note that other reviewers in this section, apparently already familiar with these physics concepts, also found that Greene's narrative made old and familiar problems much clearer, or illustrated those problems in fresh ways. I had that experience too, and I sure did like it. Are there parts of the book that are not so good? Yes, I think that the discussion of string theory at the end bogged down a bit, and lost some of the narrative's momentum. But this is a minor quibble. One last point--it me took a long time to finish this book, but I didn't regret that. Perhaps others will have the same experience. I suspect that most readers will want to go slowly here, meditate a bit, try to visualize what the author is saying, perhaps re-read an earlier chapter. But, I also think that the book richly repays such attention.