> several including myself

Nice to meet the unicorn! Meanwhile, how many textbooks are on the shelves at Barnes&Nobel? Not exactly bestsellers, right? Even the University of Washington bookstore puts the textbooks in a separate room in the basement.

> Textbook-level treatment of a subject is usually very shallow

Maybe the ones you read are. The ones Caltech uses aren't, like this one:

https://www.amazon.com/Gravitation-Charles-W-Misner/dp/06911...

I had no idea Kip Thorne was a producer for this. For non-physicists, Thorne is one of the authors of _the_ general relativity book for graduates, _Gravitation_ [1]. It's this huge telephone book sized tome that was published in 1973, and while it has fallen behind the times with respect to experimental data included in it, it is still unparallelled in scope and depth today in covering Einstein's theory.

I certainly enjoyed the movie, and I really loved the visualizations of a wormhole and of the large spinning black hole, things you usually have to imagine as a physicist without ever seeing with your eyes.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Gravitation-Physics-Series-Charles-Mis...