Customer Reviews

Stephen Hawking: A Quest For The Theory Of Everything

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I felt that Ferguson achieved a nice balance by intermingling Hawking's biography with introduction to his theories. It allows your brain to alternate between working on science and returning "back to earth" to meet an interesting human being with all his problems and victories. The science part is very layman-friendly, and at the same time is not too slow for the scientifically-minded (just a bit too politically correct, but it's understandable). The biography part is tactful, and with just the right amount of detail. The book is clear and inspiring, and she convinced me to read Hawking's "A brief history of time".

Strangely enough, Hawking's book turned out to be not as clear and inspiring as Ferguson's book. She painted him as the king of clarity, conciseness, and humor, but I don't get such an impression at all from reading his book. So now I have mixed feelings: I respect Ferguson for being good at writing and teaching (better than Hawking at both), but I'm annoyed with her for the false advertisement.

After reading "A Brief History Of Time" by Stephen Hawking, I was absolutely taken with astrophysics. Now, I'm no professional, but I could understand Hawking's book even if I had to learn to concentrate on what I was reading completely and reread some places. Hawking attempted to explain even the most complicated things - and succeeded. I thought I could pick up Kitty Ferguson's book for some easy reading on Hawking's discoveries - boy, was I wrong!

Kitty Ferguson makes absolutely no attempt to explain the things she's talking about. None! She simply gives you facts that are impossible to accept without explanations. For the most part, I did know what she was talking about - and even then I was astounded by how confusing she had managed to make it all seem, and how imprecise a few of her facts and analogies were.

If you understand the things she's talking about (and you probably do understand most of the things if you know at least something about Hawking's discoveries), you have no need to read this book. It's not even that good of a biography. If you don't know a thing about astrophysics, but would like to learn and, what's much more important, understand these things, pick up another book - and I myself would suggest the aforementioned "A Brief History Of Time" by Stephen Hawking.

After reading A Brief History of Time I decided that I wanted to learn more about Stephen Hawkings himself and how he became who he is today. I picked up this book written by Kitty Ferguson, which is claimed to be a biography and started reading it. After about twenty pages she was done talking about his life and started talking about his theories. This was disappointing to me because I thought the book was a biography.

As I continued reading I became somewhat confused while she told about Hawkings discoveries. The explanations were little or none in trying to get the reader to understand the ideas. It did not help that there were very few small illustrations that were in the book to go along with her explanations. If there were highly detailed color illustrations such as those in A Brief History In Time, it might have been much easier to understand.

I did enjoy the beginning of the book where Kitty goes into detail about the beginning of Hawkings life but I feel like it was just an overview of how he became who he is today. I would not recommend this book, instead I would recommend A Brief History In Time because it is much easier to understand because it has great illustrations and is not so mathematical.

I really liked this book at times, but found Kitty tries to hard to explain Hawking's theories. If you are not one of the Mensa crowd then it gets a little meaningless like similar to reading Greek, can you speak or read Greek? not me! Some of Hawking's theories are explained well and are pretty straight forward, such as the singularity theory and how many believe the universe has expanded and then retracted back to a singularity and then expanded and retracted over and over. Also it goes into detail about his belief that particles can escape black holes, once it reaches the event horizon it splits the negative may fall directly into the black hole past the even horizon and the positive falls away from the event horizon freeing it.This aside what I really wanted to read more about was the man Hawking himself. I mean come on, I've already read "A brief history of time". In short this book is short on explaining much about Stephen and tries to hard to explain some of his many theories.

I was really surprised to see all the mediocre reviews for this book. I think its a well written "Hawking Primer." I've noticed two primary complaints: that it is hard to digest and it doesn't succeed as a biography.

On the second count, the author explains Hawking's discomfort and self-consciousness with a straight biographical account; that he would rather a reader hear his ideas than get a lot of detailed information about himself. In a sense, you're learning more about the man with statements like this than with pages and pages about his development and daily existence. Such an attitude communicates a great deal about his humility, and in a way you'd probably never perceive if someone had just given you a book of facts about "Stephen Hawking." At any rate, it appears that the author worked closely with Hawking while she wrote, and she simply honored his request to keep the biographical information minimal.

Regarding the first count, there were a few ideas in chapter seven (if I remember correctly), concepts regarding the mathematics of movement in space-time, that I had trouble with. At the same time, the author plainly states that these ideas are not integral to understanding the broader themes and let's the reader off the hook, saying, "You can skim this if you want...its not essential that you understand it, just more interesting if you do." My background is in political science, so this stuff is completely outside my scope. If I can understand 98% of it, any reader should be able to. The 2% I didn't understand, I was told by the author not to worry about. What more do you want in an introduction to Hawking's ideas?

Another fantastic thing about the book is that it is very short. You can read the thing in one sitting if you have a mind to. It's been a long time since I felt I was investing in learning something important without also feeling like I was putting my life on hold for it. Ferguson makes one conversant in Hawking's theories and discoveries without bogging them down, making them feel like they have bitten off more than they can chew, or presenting science and mathematics in a book so large one wonders if it will ever end.

Kitty Ferguson does a great job in not only showing the biographical issues of Mr. Hawking, but also many of his works. I salute Mrs. Ferguson's ability to write a truly inspiring biographical work of Professor Hawking. This must be in the highest ranks of biographical works ever done on Hawking.