Fwiw, I like Brian Greene. He goes out of his way to make stuff more accessible to John Q. HighSchoolGrad, and he's also fairly open to some less traditional ideas, and pushes a few himself. Of course his critics say that being so popularizing-oriented leads him to be less precise with terminology, less rigorous with information, and less scientifical-sounding with his proposals and conclusions, and that his leaning towards exotic stuff leads him to mislead the public into thinking that certain ideas have more support than they really do have in the scientific community.
The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality would probably work for a start though, if you were interested. There's also video of him around the net, such as at the
World Science U thing he does.
