Susskind, a professor of theoretical physics at Stanford University, has written a book that's part insider history of science, focused on a period in the 1980s and 1990s when physicists were quarreling over the destructive capacity of black holes, and part primer on the science that explains the argument. As the subtitle makes obvious, the story contains an all-star cast of opinionated physicists: assorted Nobel laureates such as Richard Feynman, brilliant minds of the past such as Sir Isaac Newton, and, of course, Stephen Hawking, arguably the best-known theorist of black hole mechanics. Hawking is partly famous for possessing a...