How to use succinct circuits to construct an EXPTIME complete problem?
Since you're having trouble getting hold of Papadimitriou's classic textbook Computational Complexity, let me suggest another resource: Papadimitriou's paper with Yannakakis, A note on succinct representations of graphs. They prove the following general result:


  Suppose that $L$ is a P-complete problem, and that there is a polytime reduction $f$ from the Circuit Value Problem to $L$ in which, given an input $x_1\ldots x_n$ of size $n$, the $j$th bit of $f(x)$ is, irrespective of $x$, either constant of equals some input bit or its negation. Then the succinct version of $L$, which consists of pairs $\langle n,C \rangle$, where $C$ is a circuit on $\lceil \log_2 n \rceil$ inputs, such that $C(0) \ldots C(n-1) \in L$, is EXPTIME-complete.


The hard part of the proof uses the construction in the Cook–Levin theorem.