SOURCE: "General Relativity since Einstein," in Science, Vol. 207, No. 4431, February 8, 1980, pp. 631-32.

In the review below, Sciama remarks favorably on the essays collected in General Relativity: An Einstein Centenary Survey.

To celebrate the centenary of Albert Einstein Stephen Hawking and Werner Israel have gathered together 16 papers by leading authorities on general relativity. Their total impact is overwhelmingly powerful. Together they provide an outstanding modern account that covers all the important aspects: observational, mathematical, astrophysical, cosmological, and quantum mechanical. It shows very clearly that general relativity has come of age and is now part of the mainstream of science, rich in concepts and techniques and in consequences for the rest of physics and for astronomy.

The history behind this development is an interesting one. It took Einstein ten years of painful and essentially lonely effort to pass from special relativity to the general theory. Almost immediately thereafter some of...