Unfortunately, I was unable to complete this book and DNF'ed it at 38%. The author used mostly biased language, and it was not pleasant to read about. This came off as a very negative account of Hawking's life which is not something I was interested in reading more about.

Thank you to NetGalley for providing me an ARC in exchange for my honest opinion.

I had complicated feelings about this book. I thought it was a super interesting topic, and I enjoyed reading it, but I also found it to be difficult to read at times. I think, fundamentally, I'm also perhaps a little uncomfortable with the analysis of how a person is manipulated in media without that person being able to speak to or respond to that analysis. It was interesting but perhaps not for me.

I received a free electronic ARC of this biography from Netgalley, Charles Seife, and Perseus Books - Basic Books. Thank you all for sharing your hard work with me. I have read Hawking Hawking of my own volition, and this review reflects my honest opinion of this work.

This book is filled with myriad facts and events taking place during the lifetime of Steven Hawking. It doesn't, however, include the most important gift Hawking gave to us. There hasn't been a challenge I or my children have faced during our lives that wasn't tackled with the knowledge that success was possible. If Steven Hawking could get out of bed day after day, we can certainly face and overcome a challenge. He was behind the perseverance, our stubborn attempts to complete a job or a goal. He was the reason we could get out of bed, day after day.

To call him simply a 'celebrity scientist' is a gross injustice. He was, to many Americans, an inspiration, as well as a challenge to give it all you have and get it done.

That said, aside from the lack of respect this is a fine collection of Hawkingisms and a mishmash of information about his life that I found quite interesting.

I thoroughly enjoyed this one. I would have said that I knew a decent amount about Hawking before I read this but after reading it, it's clear to me that all I knew was the crafted public image. It was beyond interesting to see the ways in which the "real" man was either actively hidden or buried away. A bit of the science was slightly dense but Seife seemed to do the best job he could in conveying it in a way for any layman to better understand. It was an objective look at a man who was both hated and loved and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Given that the subtitle of this book is "The Selling of a Scientific Celebrity," I expected that to be the focus of this book. In fact, that's just a small portion of it. This is a long, thorough biography covering Hawking's life and work. It's a fascinating tale, honest and compassionate, which leaves the reader with a fuller understanding of Hawking's science and his humanity. I highly recommend it.

Thanks, NetGalley, for the ARC I received. This is my honest and voluntary review.

Let me start with this, Steven Hawking is a scientific maverick in physics World. Mind like his comes in to existence once in a century. Being a Physics graduate, I was gravitated towards him from my early days. After reading his Pop-Science books , I became fascinated with his works. Meanwhile in my study I became gradually articulated with mathematical skills. Equipped with that , I started reading his scientific papers and started discussing them with my professors who were actually internationally renowned theoretical physicists . Even with my limited knowledge . I was simply blown away by the sheer brilliance of his ideas.
Few months ago, when I saw this book , I was curious . It says it's supposed to be a big expose on Hawking's life. I have always known Hawking was a bit of attention hungry person. In a world of Kardashians and Instagram or Tic Toc influencers ,his attention seeking attitude was nothing. Then when I started read this book , it started making ridiculous and infuriating assumptions by nit-picking his life stories . Just after 20 pages, it first claims , Hawking has made his life not by his virtues but by performing various media circus, it goes so far to say that projecting himself successfully to media is his actual achievement and trajectory in life. After some times, the author contradicts himself by saying " Hawking wanted to become famous for his physics , not for his personality..."
The whole book is filled with such perplexing notion which was simply ludicrous to me.
Secondly, how do I know the author understands Gravitational cosmology enough to comment on Hawking's (Singularity , Black Hole etc. ) works when he writes sentence like "The Feynman path integral method works in a manifold that has a Euclidian geometry... " . It's not only flawed but incoherent. When he writes about Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity , it becomes evident that he doesn't even understand how length contraction or time dilation works. Any reader from non science background would be completely misled by his opaque and sometimes flawed explanations. I can't even imagine the Author of zero would do such a sloppy work!
So in Conclusion, for me , reading this book was the most unproductive thing I did in this week. If you want some juicy tabloid piece about Hawking, you may read this, if you want a analytical view about Hawking's Work, this book is not for you.

Hawking Hawking provides a fascinating and multi-faceted portrayal of one of the legends of our time. As one who grew up in the 90'/00's with a love of STEM, Stephen Hawking seemed like an exiled king, a man of prestige and influence but who was lacking a kingdom to rule. I knew of his contributions to black hole theories decades before I was born, and I had (and read) The Brief History of Time, but beyond that I didn't really know who he was beyond the iconic pictures of him in a wheelchair or soundbites of his 'voice'..

Going into this book, I was a little worried based on the title (with the negative connotations of the word 'hawking') that Selfe would take a more argumentative or hostile perspective in his biography to tear down this icon of science, but as I read further, that did not appear to be the case. While the implied thesis of the title (the highly likely self-celebritization of Hawking) does certainly factor throughout the book, I thought Selfe did an admirable job giving Hawking and everyone who featured in the book a fair shake, even providing multiple accounts at times where differing perspectives yielded different recollections of history. I am particularly impressed given the author's note at the end regarding the difficulty there exists to glean any personal history of the author from archived sources as the book as a whole felt very solidly researched and substantiated.. In addition to covering the Hawking the person, Selfe proves himself a very good communicator of science, managing to take the rather mindbending content of Hawking and others' works (fundamental physics, black holes, LIGO, etc.) and break it down into easy to digest pieces that I expect would make this heady science understandable by most who may pick up this book. Contentwise, I would give this book a full 5-stars.

Where the book was a bit lacking for me was the structure. While I do give props to Selfe for taking a risk and structuring the book itself in homage to Hawking's reversal of the arrow of time hypothesis by starting at the end of Hawking's life and moving backwards in time, this led to particular problems in the later half of the book as the human brain does not think/process backwards as well., something Selfe accounts for in his writing. The two biggest problems I noted that emerged from this conflict were repetition and confusion of the material. If one wants to describe an event "C" in a person's life, one may have to explain earlier related events "B" and perhaps "A" for proper context. When written chronologically, there is no problem. However, in this book, you would read ABC, then AB, then A, Additionally, if ABC is the evolution of a scientific theory, it can become rather confusing when one emerges from the book which theories were proven right or wrong as information is lost as you work backwards. Because of both of these problems, the second half of the book drags at times and proves a frustrating read others despite the good and interesting information provided in each chapter. Every chapter by itself was very well written, but as a whole, I do think the book suffers, requiring a much greater page count (due to the repetition) and readers' energy as they untangle the 'new' old developments from the recent new developments in both science and personal relationships. In the end, I think he could have both paid tribute and written a better b0ok by writing the book normally then having it printed backwards, even if I had to hold a mirror to the book to read it all the while.

Overall, I found this an excellent read full of interesting anecdotes that humanizes a mythological figure though the structure may prove frustrating to some. I do expect that having read this work, I will be reading other books by Selfe in the near future. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for allowing me access to this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Charles Seife looks at Hawking, as Hawking looked at the Universe - backward in time. A homage to Hawking and his phD thesis. At times critical of his contributions to science or his general attitude to people in life makes this a biography worthwhile reading. Of course, similar like Isaacson's biography on Einstein, expect to be overwhelmed with some of the theoretical physics in the book. Total forgiveness to the author on that one, as you cannot tell Hawking's story without it. It is neither Einstein's, Hawking's or Seife's fault that it just is so complicated.

While I understand Charles choice to tell the story backwards, ending in Hawking's biological singularity, it does not help comprehension of the story. Artistically pleasing is not what I am seeking in non-fiction writing. As one progresses in the book, you feel that the next chapter is sort of a flashback to the previous chapter, which connects at the end of each chapter to the ending of the previous one. Telling the story linear would have made the book easier to read, some aspects are difficult enough already. One star deduction for this, for an otherwise great read and a great conclusion to the life of the greatest physicist of the 2nd half of the 20th century.

I wasn't sure if I would learn much new here, having seen the Hawking film and read articles about him over the years. Turns out I did, so the read was worthwhile. The author makes the bold move of telling Hawking's story in reverse, presumably in an attempt to show his life with decreasing entropy. It has the effect of placing his later, more familiar life first, even though his major scientific work occurred early on. Yet it lets us see him at the height of fame first and work back to how he got there. The tradeoff, though, is that the author often has to explain later events to put them in context, which means there is a lot of repetition. Frankly, whole passages are repeated nearly verbatim, first when they are needed to explain context, later when they actually appear in the reverse narrative. This was disappointing. I often had to put the book down to get over this, then pick it up again the next day. All in all, it was worth a read and I give it an A for effort (but a C for execution).