I'm giving this 2-stars because it is a 2 star book. Calling it "okay" is a bit positive for how I felt about it. It took me 2-1/2 weeks to read this book, mostly because I could really only read about a chapter per day.

My overall feeling is that this is book people read to feel smug. This book came highly recommended. I know that many recommended it to me. It is a highly readable book. And I may have liked it if I'd read it in grad school when I think it was most often mentioned to me. It has sat on my TBR pile waiting to be read for a decade.

Unfortunately, the book is out-of-date, and I already knew much of the physics covered from my own interests and education. This meant I did not find it educational, entertaining, nor interesting. I'm not sure what level of physics background is needed to enjoy this book. Hawking does a relatively decent job giving background and hand-waving physics basics. But sometimes he mentions physics particles and forces with no introduction at all, which I'd think would be confusing if you didn't have sufficient physics background to already know about them. Likewise, science changes. Some of the "final theories" given as fact have long since been updated. My copy was published in 1995. Maybe there's a more recent published copy that has updates. Unfortunately, Hawking prefaces updated theories within the text, so an added chapter without re-writes within the book would not be as good.

Hawking, hopefully inadvertently, carries on the institutional sexism of science and physics by citing all the "who discovered what" as recognized by some organization and did not do his own literature search because, surprise!, every person (but one) he cites is a man. There were instances of this where I know a woman made a discovery and he attributes it to a man because some prize organization did so.

Additionally, it is never a good sign when I start copy-editing when reading a book. I'm not sure what the 3 biographies at the end are supposed to be. They seemed a bit random. I didn't really care for the Introduction by Carl Sagan either.