Immediately recognizable in his wheelchair and surrounded by an entourage of nurses, Stephen Hawking was a symbol of the power of mind over matter. The public adored him, and the media compared hirn to Newton and Einstein. Appearing at concerts, on The Simpsons, and even on the edge of space, he was widely considered the world's best physicist, and even its smartest person.

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In fact, he was neither. In HAWKING HAWKING: The Selling of a Scientific Celebrity (Basic Books; April 6, 2021), science journalist and author Charles Selfe upends everything we thought we knew about Hawking, showing how his greatest genius was arguably in his talent for self-promotion. Delving deeper than previous biographies, which tend to be excessively flattering, Seife reveals Hawking as an important scientist whose importance is almost universally misunderstood; a person who suffered deeply and also caused deep suffering; a celebrity his forebears and fundamentally changed the concept of a scientific celebrity." scientist who broke the mold.

To understand Hawking, Seife traces his life in reverse, starting with his elaborate funeral at Westminster Abbey, where he was interred few feet away from Newton and Darwin, through the decades when he searched in the limelight for the recognition he craved, and further back to his devastating ALS diagnosis at age 21 and the beginning of his first marriage, which would end in scandal. Hawking made important contributions early in his career, most notably in his work on black holes, but as his celebrity grew he was increasingly apt to declare victory over problems he hadn't solved, persuading audiences of his authority on topics about which he knew little and enlisting students to defend him as he failed to break any new ground in the quest for a "theory of everything."

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