Book of the week: Stephen Hawking: An Unfettered Mind by Kitty Ferguson

(Palgrave Macmillan, $27)

If the world took note of Stephen Hawking’s 70th birthday last month, the attention was due in part to the event’s “profound unlikelihood,” said Sara Lippincott in the Los Angeles Times. When Hawking was first diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, in his early 20s, the young Cambridge University physicist was given just two years to live. But as Kitty Ferguson notes in her “intelligent and readable” new biography, the future author of A Brief History of Time had bigger things on his mind than death. Once a poor student, he had begun obsessing about the nature of the universe when he learned, at 15, that it was constantly expanding. The reach of his intellect soon was expanding too, even as his body began its gradual decline. Ferguson’s book captures not just the scope of his theoretical work but the “unbelievable insouciance” he’s exhibited in learning to live with severe disabilities.

But the book about Hawking that we really want wouldn’t be as “starry-eyed” as this one, said Ed Lake in the London Telegraph. For all Hawking’s impressive insights into cosmology, after all, he’s also a global celebrity who’s always been a canny manager of his fame. He seems fully aware that his disease and his voice synthesizer “make him a convenient symbol for the life of the mind.” Indeed, he’s kept himself in the public eye by accepting that role in pop culture and occasionally opining on big questions that have nothing to do with physics. His celebrity life “cries out for” a “muckraking biography” that includes plenty of chatter about his savviest professional ploys and his two little-understood marriages. Ferguson is apparently too close to Hawking to deliver that.

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Yet “even without a more searching treatment of his character, Hawking’s remains an irresistible story,” said Laura Miller in Salon.com. Ferguson helps us fully understand the challenges of Hawking’s disability, and she “shines” at explaining his theories—particularly those in his most recent book, The Grand Design. To dive into Hawking’s later work is “to enter a trippy dream landscape, filled with multiple tiny curled-up dimensions and ‘baby’ universes.” The ideas are heady, but there may be no better elucidator than Ferguson, “not even, dare I say it, Hawking himself.” Ferguson may not give readers much behind-the-scenes dirt, but “giving the rest of us a glimmer of the wonders swirling inside Hawking’s head is no small feat.” And the view we get there “may be the truest portrait of all.”