SOURCE: "The Absolute Now," in London Review of Books, May 12, 1994, pp. 15-16.

In the following excerpt, Leslie reviews Black Holes and Baby Universes and asserts that while he admires Hawking's work, the essays make contradictory arguments.

After the enormous press coverage of A Brief History of Time, all the world knows that Stephen Hawking has motor neurone disease, can speak only with a computer-synthesised voice controlled by the few fingers that he can move, and fills the same Cambridge chair as Newton did. The 14 essays of the new book, together with a Christmas Day radio interview of 1992, form a very mixed bunch. They cover Hawking's early years, his experiences with slowly progressing paralysis, his views about the human race and its probable future, and some of his physical and cosmological ideas. These are introduced at levels varying from the elementary to the fairly advanced: one of the essays...