Book Review: My Brief History

My Brief History
-- Stephen Hawking

As I could understand some parts of The Theory of Everything (Attributed to Stephen Hawking, though he denounced it as unauthorized publication), I picked this one up. Unlike other popular books by him (Brief History of Time and Briefer History of Time), this one is not much about science, but about Hawking, as the title suggests.

He talks about his childhood, his introduction to Mathematics and Physics, the disease that paralyzed most of his body in his twenties etc., Readers would be able to appreciate the way he chose theoretical physics over experimental, as he wouldn't have survived in fields that needed more than his brain, due to his disease; the way he lived constantly with uncertainty about his survival, yet contributed so much to physics, and regarded today as the most brilliant theoretical physicist since Einstein; the way he handled personal crises such as his wife living with another guy in his own house, assuming that he wouldn't be around too long etc.,

Besides such memorial stuff, he discusses briefly his original ideas about big bang, black holes and time travel. But, readers interested in these should be better off reading his The Theory of Everything or Briefer History of Time.

Unless one is a die-hard fan of Stephen Hawking, one can give it a pass.