It feels like everyone who grew up in the 90s had a copy of A Brief History of Time kicking around the house. It was a book I recall picking up from time to time as a child, but I never made it more than a couple paragraphs. Published almost 20 years after the 1988 classic, A Briefer History of Time is for folks who felt that initial draw, but were overwhelmed by the complexity fo the ideas presented.
Hawking and Mlodinow do a great job whittling the already pretty short but conceptually dense original into something a layperson can readily grasp, providing a sort of guided tour through the history of physics, pointing out the major discoveries and peering into the coming horizon with speculation about what the future of science might hold. The concepts remain difficult—if they were easy, they woudl be inaccurate—but the authors do a good job of explaining through analogy, and offer generalizations that paint a fairly accurate picture without getting the reader snarled in a thicket of technical description. I still plan to read the original one day, but its briefer cousin is a welcome alternative for now.