Rating: 
Summary: good reference for advanced, NOT A LOGICAL INTRO to GR
Review:
This book is known as the 'bible' of General Relativity or 'MTW'.
People with different preparation will perceive MTW in different ways:
The beginners in GR very often will feel that the book is a good reference and shows 'properties' of the defined objects instead of explaining the logical necessity of demanding such properties. My first course in GR was based on that book and although I learned some 'index gymnastics' from it, very often I had questions of the type 'where does this come from, why is it defined this way'. Often I would read about something like 'affine parameter' and I would not understand its importance at all.
For beginners I recommend the books from J.Hartle, B. Schutz, and S. Carroll in order of increasing abstraction. I am currently in the middle of course based on the Carroll's book and I understand things I have never ever been able to understand from the 'bible' like the fact that we may define different connections but only one of them is metric compatible and we CHOOSE to work with it, or that we CHOOSE to work with a torsion free connection, or that reparametrizing a geodesic may not give you back a geodesic (in relation to the affine parameter remark above) ... Such facts are either not clearly spelled in the 'bible' or they are digged in somewhere 300 pages away ...
Once you are past your first (or better second) course in GR, that book will be an invaluable reference for you with plenty of examples how to apply different computational and theoretical techniques in GR.
The reviewers that give it high rating are obviously either experienced in the field or are begginners that value a book only because of the well-known authours.
The book is really a titanic effort to compile all relevant pieces of info into one thick volume BUT PLEASE PLEASE think carefully before you recommend it for INTRODUCTION to General Relativity !!!
Rating: 
Summary: Too many useless ramblings...
Review: ... the discussion is filled with too many useless ramblings (either in track-1 or track-2)...[and] it almost doesn't teach us global methods. Global methods are extremely important to study singularities and black hole structures. If you want to get a good view in general relativity, I strongly suggest the following: study deeply differential geometry and topology first (from James Munkres, Kobayashi, Eisenhart, or Hocking's book, etc.), read P.A.M Dirac's little book "General Relativity", and finally combine your forces on Robert Wald's "General Relativity" + Hawking's "The Large-Scale Structure of Space-time". If you do the above intellectual workouts, I guarantee that you can master general relativity thoroughly.
Rating: 
Summary: Gravity Defying
Review: After reading this text, I became thoroughly competent in General Relativity as well as the requisite elegent mathematical tools needed to fully understand this truly beautiful subject. Moreover, I have since gone further in this field with my own self-discovery. In particular, in my search for a unified quantum field theory of gravity, I have discovered that a new field emerges out of the space-time energy manifold, which gives rise to a gravity-induced collpase of the wave function of a system. This emergent field is self-referential and emergent and is the basis of consciousness. Upon fully realizing the implications of this newly discovered theory, I knew that I should be able to locally vary the space-time energy manifold around me by mere thought alone. Indeed I did this on the night of November 14, 2004 and levitated a good meter off the ground for at least a full minute before my stupid girlfriend came into the room and shouted "Devil! You're a devil!" and fled in horror. My concentration was instantly broken and I fell to the ground, spraining my ankle in the process. Damn gravity! And come to think of it, this is all the fault of Wheeler, Misner, and that Californian hippie dude guy, Kip Thorn. Stupid gravity book! Yeah, it's brilliantly written and a fascinating subject. But now I have a sprained ankle and my girlfriend left me and won't talk to me. I just might sue all these authors for pain and suffering. All my girlfriend does now is send me some religious tracks and tells me that she and her prayer group partners are praying for me. I keep telling them this isn't supernatural and that it is all science, but they hold up and cross their fingers at me in the makeshift form of a crucifix and quote bible verses at me. Stupid bible-quoting prayer group groupies! I'm not sure but I think they are a cult maybe. So no girlfriend now. I just might sue for emotional damages too! Anyway, I give this book five-stars if you too want to learn all about gravity. But be warned! You might start levitating one night, your girlfriend might get all freaked out, and then you fall to the ground and crash, both literally and figuratively, and just end up lonely and angry and everything. But you'll still be a master of GR and hey who needs that no good, easily scared, verse quoting girlfriend anyway?! Oh, I didn't mean that. Really Karen, if you're reading this, please baby, come back. I promise no more "devil flying tricks." OK? Oh yeah, this is definitely a great book--and probably won't really ruin your life.
Rating:
Summary: Heavy Book - All Meat - No Fat!
Review: At 1279 pages - this is a heavy book! But rightly so as it is the definitive volume on the most weighty subject - gravity. As John Archibald Wheeler tells in his book Geons, Black Holes and Quantum Foam, "In the summer of 1968 I suggested to my recent former students Charlie Misner... and Kip Thorne... that they write a book... It's time for a book that incorporates all the recent developments, one that emphasises the physics and not just the mathematics." "We talked about the length and coverage of the book, and the division of labor. A concise book of 200 pages or so, with six to eight chapters, ought to do it, we agreed. ...When any two of us said it was done, it would be done." "When [W. H. Freeman] brought out the book in 1973, it had 1,279 pages divided into nine sections and fourty-four chapters - and it offered two tracks through the forest. Naturally, we are happy that more than twenty eight years and more than 60,000 English-language copies later, Gravitation is still selling." I am happy too! Wheeler, Thorne and Misner recently reviewed, and rejected a request to revise and reissue the book, so look for this classic to become scarce as it has been some time since its last printing.
Rating:
Summary: The Bible of gravitational physics
Review: By size and content, this book ranks as one of the largest in physics . Not only does it give an excellent discussion of all of the concepts in gravitational physics, but it gives clear presentations of the relevant mathematics, not hesitating at all to employ useful diagrams and pictures. Truly a classic, it is a work that is sure to be read by future generations of students in gravitational physics. I can still remember the excitement I felt when picking the book up for the first time. The authors are giants in the field, and it is great that they chose to take the time to write such an excellent book. It is readily apparent that they care a great deal about what the reader will take away after reading such a large book, as the presentation is always crystal clear and a great joy to read. Space prohibits a thorough review, so I will instead highlight the parts of the book that I found particularly exceptional: 1. The example of how coordinate singularities arise: the "cells of the egg crate" squashed to zero volume. 2. The beautiful illustration of the Roll-Krotkov-Dicke experiment. 3. The "physics demo" of a local inertial frame of reference (it is not very difficult to construct this demonstration for actual use in a classroom). 4. The presentation of a 2-form as a honeycomb of tubes with a sense of circulation. Such an explanation is lacking in the general mathematical literature. 5. The flying ring demonstration illustrating Faraday stresses. This demonstration is done very often in physics classes, and is simple to set up. 6. The excellent discussion (with illustrations) of the covariant derivative and the Schild ladder construction. 7. The presentation of parallel transport around a closed curve. 8. The treatment of Riemann normal coordinates. These are typically presented in a purely formal way in most texts on general relativity, ignoring their status as providing a local inertial frame in curved spacetime. 9. The (philosophical) discussion on the principal of general covariance in the context of Newtonian gravity in tensorial form. 10. The illustration, with accompanying discussion, on a situation where two events can be connected by more than one geodesic. The authors mention the relation of this example to the Morse theory of critical points. 11. The discussion of the Bianchi identities and the topological result on the boundary of a boundary being empty. 12. The discussion on the gravity gradiometer. 13. The exceptional discussion on six routes to the Einstein field equation. 14. The variational principle and the initial value problem in the Einstein equation. 15. The connection between the Gauss-Weingarten equations and extrinsic curvature. 16. The ADm formulation of the dynamics of geometry. 17. The discussion on Mach's principle. 18. The radial oscillations of a Newtonian star. 19. The Hamilton-Jacobi description of motion and its employment in analyzing the central force problem. 20. The effect of the value of the cosmological constant on cosmological models and evolution of the universe. 21. The cosmological redshift and its explanation via the expansion of the universe. 22. The mathematics of the Mixmaster cosmology. 23. The dynamics of the Schwarzschild geometry. 24. The discussion on the global properties of spacetime and singularity theorems. 25. The short biographies of Hawking and Penrose. 26. The quadrupole nature of gravitational radiation. 27. The experimental justification of general relativity, particularly the description of Pound-Rebka experiment on the gravitational redshift.
Rating:
Summary: a true classic
Review: I believe this is a must for every theoretical physicists.
This is a huge book containing so much information. I could
say it is flawless, and it virtually has no typos(Look at
books on superstring published so far). This is one of the
best books in a hundred years. Read it with Wald's General
Relativity.
Rating:
Summary: The cosmological equivalent of the bible.
Review: I do not know how Misner, Wheeler and Thorne did it. A
once in a lifetime achievement. Pray that some day another
group of brilliant minds updates this. And you can use it
to improve your upper body strenth, too!
Rating:
Summary: Fantastic, but take it easy!
Review: I think this is the best book in Gravitation made ever. It's clear, with a lot of clarifying pictures and a lot of references. The only problem is that is so huge that you will spend hours and hours trying to read it, but you will learn really a lot about the physical ideas behind the mathematical stuff.
Rating:
Summary: Forbidding but very readable if you work
Review: I used the first 11 chapters as an introduction to differential geometry and, after translating the math into my own notation, found this source to be the best available, hands down. The authors use the mathematicians' notation, labeling infinitesimal generators as tangent vectors, a notation that I personally find to be annoying. This is nearly the only readable source, in English, of Cartan's (after the fact) observation that Newtonian gravitational orbits are (limit of GR with G fixed as c goes to infinity) geodesics in space-time, with the curvature in the (x,t), (y,t) and (z,t) subspaces, with space Euclidean and time absolute. Beautiful!
Rating:
Summary: The pinnacle of 1970s textbook layouts
Review: I used to drool over this book in the university bookshop. It was, by far, the best laid-out textbook I had ever seen. It was expensive, even by the standards of 1980, the year I eventually bought it. This probably disqualifies me as an Amazon reviewer, but I have to admit that I've never read it. I was a mathematician by degree, and am now a writer on marketing matters. Whenever I need inspiration on how to lay out and explain a complex concept which needs both words and diagrams, this is the book I return to.
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