I liked Scott's review, I had a similar impression when I read the book. The claim about philosophy being dead is of course stupid, but the sentiment behind it, for the particular question of how it all started, is exactly right.

I had read other books by Hawking and others on these topics, so I found the book to be lacking debth, but it was nevertheless an interesting read. And I'm intrigued by model-dependent realism, I think I even find it the most plausible view, even though I'm skeptical about the black box example (or something like that, I read the book right when it came out so it was long ago) Hawkings gave, ultimately, there must be *some* explanation to the matter, mustn't there? You can't have two mutually contradicting models that lead to the same prediction. If the blackbox could be further examined, different predictions would have to come into play.