A monumental, often magnificent, and occasionally exasperating cathedral of general relativity: indispensable for the ambitious reader, but far from an easy or uniformly elegant book.
I have long regarded Gravitation as one of the great technical monuments of twentieth-century physics. Its ambition is almost indecent: to present general relativity not merely as a theory of curved spacetime, but as a living intellectual landscape, with black holes, gravitational waves, cosmology, variational methods, and the geometry of tensors all brought into a single architectural whole. In that sense, it succeeds extraordinarily well. Few books have ever made the subject feel so large, so various, and so alive.
Yet a monument is not the same thing as a perfect guide. The book is famously encyclopaedic, but encyclopaedic does not mean pedagogically even. Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler are at their best when they are deriving, classifying, and re-framing ideas with real mathematical confidence; they are less successful when enthusiasm outruns exposition. The famously exuberant style can become mannered, even opaque, and one is sometimes left with the impression that the authors would prefer to dazzle the reader into insight rather than lead them there by the hand. For the self-motivated reader this can be exhilarating; for the less experienced it is often merely exhausting.
I also think the book’s strengths are inseparable from its limitations. Its conceptual boldness occasionally comes at the expense of economy: important ideas are repeated, recast, and embroidered in a way that can clarify one chapter and clutter the next. The sheer bulk is not an incidental defect but part of the experience; one does not read Gravitation so much as labour through it. And while it remains technically serious, it reflects the era in which it was written, so a modern reader may find some material unevenly dated in emphasis, notation, or taste. This is not a fatal objection, but it matters in a book that aspires to be a foundational text.
Still, I cannot pretend that its faults cancel its achievement. When Gravitation is working, it is astonishing: rigorous, imaginative, and morally committed to the proposition that general relativity deserves to be understood in full, not merely memorised in fragments. I admire its ambition more than its grace, and its intelligence more than its restraint. If I am severe about its excesses, it is because the book asks to be judged as a classic, and classics ought to be made to answer for themselves.
Who should read this
Read this if you already have mathematical maturity and want a sprawling, serious, and historically central treatment of general relativity. I would not recommend it as a first encounter with the subject unless you are unusually patient and well prepared.
A personal note from PhD
I respect Gravitation enormously, but I do not love it without reservation. It is one of those rare books that can make me grateful and irritated on the same page, which is perhaps as close to greatness as technical writing often comes.
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