PositiveNew RepublicIt visits Hawking just as he is transitioning into a rare planetary superstardom ... it captures Hawking’s thirst for that kind of recognition—or, at the very least, his unalloyed delight at securing it. More than anything else, the story underscores the sheer improbability of this entire affair. People had poured into an auditorium to hear an immobile man with a computerized voice speak about bewildering theories in physics—a prospect so audacious and remote, at most other times, that Hawking himself was unprepared for it ... Seife provides a lively survey of Hawking’s career, although somewhat perplexingly he unrolls his story backward—death to life, nuts to soup. His purpose is not to reveal Stephen Hawking the human being ... have done that with varying degrees of success, although Seife builds that portrait out with fresh interviews and research. But he’s really in pursuit of a more intriguing quarry: Hawking’s relationship with his public, and the source of his celebrity ... Seife is a clear interpreter of Hawking’s physics, but he is also determined to be a cool judge of Hawking’s career. Some of his discoveries are new and disconcerting ... Some of Seife’s other criticisms—designed to shake the myth of Hawking’s all-surpassing brilliance—might baffle the professional scientist. He notes that some of Hawking’s ideas were wrong, and that he came upon a proof for Hawking radiation only while trying to demolish another physicist’s preliminary work in that direction—except that both mistakes and bloody-mindedness are essential to scientific advance ... His project is to appraise the gap between Hawking’s private personality and his public persona, to show how—unsurprisingly, as with any darling of the press—the persona towered over and obscured the personality, and to reveal Hawking to be the deliberate architect of that persona.
