  The subject of this work is the formation of black holes in pure general
relativity, by the focusing of incoming gravitational waves. The theorems
established in this monograph constitute the first foray into the long time
dynamics of general relativity in the large, that is, when the initial data are
no longer confined to a suitably small neighborhood of Minkowskian data. The
theorems are general, no symmetry conditions on the initial data being imposed.
