This is the manuscript copy of my review (see scanned pages below). I'm not sure if I ever got
a copy of the printed version. It was published sometime in late 1988,
in Spectrum, in Little Rock, Arkansas. I was living in Austin, Texas at the time. Maybe I'd let my subscription to Spectrum
expire, since money was difficult to come by after I got fired from my
technical writing job in September of '88. See other posts below for more info on Spectrum and some of my other articles that appeared in it.
Update, July 2014:
In my review, I mention an error I found on page 21 of A Brief History of Time. (See pages 3 and 4 of my manuscript.) I checked the Pine Bluff library's copy of A Brief History of Time
and the error had been corrected in it, although it isn't a newer
edition than my copy or even a later printing, as far as I can tell.
But in the process of comparing the two copies, I noticed mine is a
Book-of-the-Month club printing,
given to me in April 1988 by Karen Jo (we were married at the time). So it was probably printed even earlier than the normal
first printing and thus had that uncorrected error (and others too,
probably) in it. The book can now be read in its entirety on the Web. Here's the uncorrected sentence from page 21 in my copy of the book: "The time it has taken is, after all, just the light's speed--which the observers agree on--multiplied by the distance the light has traveled--which they do not agree on." The problem: time is equal to distance divided by speed, no matter what speed you're talking about. Here's the corrected sentence, as it appears on page 12 of the link I provided above: "The time taken is the distance the light has traveled--which the observers do not agree on--divided by the light's speed--which they do agree on." Hawking, as is his way, likes to joke about the publication date of the book being April 1st 1988, which I guess was his choice. "Black Holes Ain't So Black" is chapter 7 of the book, not chapter 4 as I say in my review. Hey, we all make mistakes. The big question is will they be discovered, or admitted to, and corrected?
