Both of them are beyond excellent from a story telling and visual prospective: highly entertaining, motivating, and fun.

However the “physicists will stop talking to you” bit just comes from the fact that professionals typically expect rigorous discussions, instead of handwaving; as handwaving will sometimes leads to reasonable, yet completely nonsensical results. And over-fantasization of a topic can cause student burnouts quite quickly, when they discovered the field is completely different from what they imagined. Finally many just don’t enjiy string theory, as they describe a universe that is fundamentally different from ours, and they just keeps making up more math to fix unrealized predictions.

In general, I think the Brain Greene do benefit both the field physics and the general public, by bringing many talented students to physics. And I believe many teachers and professors can learn a lot about storytelling and visualization from pop sciences.