Stephen Hawking: A Life in Science (Penguin Press Science)

click here for more details, find new or used items	Michael White, John Gribbin New from £5.00 Used from £0.01 Pages: 352 (Paperback) ISBN: 0140271686 Pub: Penguin Books Ltd Pub date: 1998-05-28 Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 79387

Reader Reviews:

Exposing the man for his 'fame'does few favours for science. (3/4 people found this helpful)

Mixed feelings. Here we have alternating chapters on the personal life of Hawking, even including the family street address in St. Albans!, set against the chapters on the physical ideas he has developed. The treatment may be non-technical as it must surely be possible to do but this is unusual for a Penguin book of non-fiction and even more here for this book reads for the most part like an extended piece of middle-brow tabloid journalism. For example, ' Having become engaged to Jane, he realized that he would need to find a job very quickly if they were to be married' (p.88) I point out in particular that the excessive interest in the 'private' life of the man which surely goes against the Preface remarks of sensitivity in this area. Surely in a cosmology book we can do without the cult of personality phenomenon which can only but promote fame and devalue science. This book does not really counteract the myth of this 'man of genius'. Such is the uncritical reliance on the already substantial Hawkings comment literature that this book like the bad influence of press-cuttings on an individual can only be another part of the hagiographic treatment of the man.(we are told that Hawking is so strong and independent a character) It is simply much easier to write this way. Finally it is because the writing is so accessible and that only a little effort is needed in the reading of this book, that rather like tourists herded out to say, sStonehenge by tour-bus, we wonder what all the fuss is about, and may fail to really appreciate the momentous nature of the events described.

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