I will be cheating on this review a little bit.  I will be using a bit of my cousins review of this book as well.  As someone who follows theoretical physics I was very familiar with the concepts discussed in this book.  My cousin on the other hand, was not.  A Brief History of Time is a wonderful book that explores the basic questions you see often in cosmology.  How the universe started, what it may look like, how old it is, some theories of time and the universe, and, of course, black holes.  Gotta have the black holes.  I found it to be an excellent read and very much enjoyed some of the quips that Hawking used to explain complicated concepts like matter and anti-matter for example.  

The book does have a lot of difficult and yet interesting concepts.  I still think everyone should give it a shot.  Maybe, find yourself a nerd to help you understand it if you need to.  We LOVE to talk about this stuff.  That being said because it is somewhat difficult to understand I will give a small deduction.

4.5/5