This is a book review of General Relativity: The Theoretical Minimum by Leonard Susskind & André Cabannes.
General Relativity: The Theoretical Minimum, by Leonard Susskind and André Cabannes (Penguin), 2023. Pp. 387, 20 × 13 cm. Price £10.99 (paperback, ISBN 978 0 141 99986 9).
This book is one of many, with various co-authors, based on Susskind's lecture series The Theoretical Minimum. Rather that deliver essentially all of the maths first, Susskind presents the basics of tensors, curvature, geodesics, and metrics before three chapters on black holes, but in those chapters brings in more maths (e.g. various types of coordinates) as needed. The Einstein field equations don't appear until the ninth chapter, before the final one on gravitational waves. It differs from most other books in that the basic concepts are presented in enough detail actually to learn them relatively easily. However, the details are conceptual, not necessarily mathematical. The emphasis is on understanding, not on mechanical calculation. Common topics such as the difference between contravariant and covariant tensors and Christoffel symbols are explained rather than just presented. The book is well written and I will probably read the others in the series.