Hawkings' view on this matter is even more radical that it was last time I looked.
This is from a recent Hawkings lecture posted on his web site:
"the universe would start at a single point, like the North Pole of the Earth. But this point wouldn't be a singularity, like the Big Bang. Instead, it would be an ordinary point of space and time"
By now, I expect you've googled up several dozen physics lectures that contain the phrase "something for nothing", a phrase in common use to talk about the fact that quantum particles spontaneously pop into and out of existance everywhere, all the time. The mathematics of NP-PN junctions in transistors, called Ebers-Moll equations, describe this phenomenon analytically. Ask yourself how there can be a current through an electrically impermiable junction, because you and I are communicating with each other through quite a few such junctions.
Sorry, your Amazon link only directs me to the book title. My query produced 0 results. "No reference to 'something from nothing' in this book". The term "nothing" did not appear in the lecture as far as I could tell.
Even if you can boil the first something down to "an ordinary point of space and time", it would still be something, even if extremely discrete. What causes space or time to exist?
While I'm sure Hawking's view is a brilliant explanation for the formation of the universe, it still does not support the something from nothing position, in my opinion. Perhaps he holds your view (though I have yet to see it), but supporting it scientifically is something else altogether.
I did find this statement in his book: "Because energy cannot be created out of nothing, one of the partners in a particle/antiparticle pair will have positive energy, and the other partner negative energy."
Without redefining the universe as a big cumultive "nothing", or rethinking conservation, something from nothing does not work.