If you're up for a real wild ride and have some time to kill (no, seriously - the thing is over 1000 pages), Roger Penrose's The Road To Reality (http://www.amazon.com/Road-Reality-Complete-Guide-Universe/d...) actually covers this stuff in a reasonably accessible way.
I can't say how it would read to a newbie, but ostensibly he wrote that book to be aimed more at the smart but uninitiated pop-sci audience than the practicing physicists. I'm not sure he hit his mark, quite, but when I was a second year physics undergrad I found it pretty easy to get through at least the first half (though I had worked through MTW's Gravitation first, so I wasn't totally new to the material - also an excellent book, if you've got months to spend on it and some more lightweight general relativity books to look at as supplements).
It probably depends, though - when you say "newbie", do you mean "F=MA means nothing to me and I barely passed single variable calculus", or "I got straight A's in vector calculus and excelled at freshman physics through basic quantum mechanics but never took more"? If it's the former, you'll want to grab Feynman's freshman lectures first, they'll get you thinking right about this stuff if you make it through them, and later you can start to worry about stuff like tensor calculus...
I can't say how it would read to a newbie, but ostensibly he wrote that book to be aimed more at the smart but uninitiated pop-sci audience than the practicing physicists. I'm not sure he hit his mark, quite, but when I was a second year physics undergrad I found it pretty easy to get through at least the first half (though I had worked through MTW's Gravitation first, so I wasn't totally new to the material - also an excellent book, if you've got months to spend on it and some more lightweight general relativity books to look at as supplements).
It probably depends, though - when you say "newbie", do you mean "F=MA means nothing to me and I barely passed single variable calculus", or "I got straight A's in vector calculus and excelled at freshman physics through basic quantum mechanics but never took more"? If it's the former, you'll want to grab Feynman's freshman lectures first, they'll get you thinking right about this stuff if you make it through them, and later you can start to worry about stuff like tensor calculus...