Stephen hawking science biography books

Stephen Hawking painted by Yolanda Sonnabend in 1985.


I don’t know how I have the gall to review this book, because I only read half of it. I didn’t read one half and then stop…. rather I read the whole thing, but jumping all the science chapters. I am of an age where I am no longer prepared to do battle with ideas that I will have forgotten a year later, and I’m afraid Stephen Hawking’s work in cosmology comes into this bracket.

So, what was left? A biography of a charismatic and brilliant scientist with motor neuron disease, who overcame serious limitations and went on to achieve great things.

Even without the science it was a fascinating book. Learning about Hawking’s family, and his father’s ambitions for him, his time at Oxford as an undergraduate, then as a graduate and eventually as a fellow and research scientist at Cambridge.

We learn of his accolades and honours, his family life, physical difficulties to be overcome, a medical episode where he almost lost his life, and the enormous success of his most famous book A Short History of Time – and there follows a discussion about its readability that I found most cheering in view of skipping the science chapters in this book!

His fame grows enormously. “Hawking en

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