I highly recommend Road to Reality by Roger Penrose. Takes you all the way from classical through modern physics, and introduces all the necessary math. Gives you a good overview of the territory, but you might want to supplement with some extra literature/lectures to go more in-depth certain places.
Penrose's is a terrible book for a beginner to try to learn from. It's a weird mix of relatively simple stuff and one you can't possibly appreciate if you do not have a degree in math or physics. It has a tendency to dwell on simple and familiar things and then rush through rather involved topics that are no doubt something a beginner would not have a chance to be prepared for.
I don't know of anybody who's ever learned new stuff from that book. It literally zooms from addition and subtraction to fiber bundles in a few hundred pages. That's simply not enough to pick up anything but the bare intuition, and certainly not enough to do any nontrivial calculations. The only people I know who enjoyed the book at all were those who already knew the stuff in it, but in that case the book was pointless!
All have written numerous excellent books on various physics topics, and each explains the concepts they wish to convey clearly, with as much or as little mathematics as you like.
Before I went to university to read physics, I devoured their (and others) popular science books, and had a pretty good understanding of the majority of the material on my degree course before I started it - the degree filled in the blanks, annealed the maths in my mind - but there’s little as good as a book written by an expert on a topic to imbue knowledge.
In general I think actual textbooks or course materials (the OP mentioned MIT Open Courseware, which I think is a good set of course materials--full disclosure: I'm an MIT alum) are better for learning physics, or any scientific field, than pop science books, however high quality.
That said, if you are going to read pop science books, I don't think Michio Kaku is a good choice. He is much too prone to treat way-out speculations as though they were established physics.
