An unflattering yet outstanding biography of a giant of 20th-century physics.
Stephen Hawking (1942-2018) was the world’s most famous scientist for the last 30 years of his life. This engrossing, sometimes unsettling account shows why.
NYU journalism professor Seife writes that Hawking converted cosmology from a backwater to “the most exciting field in physics, an area that was (and still is) generating Nobel Prize after Nobel Prize for transforming our understanding of how the universe came to be.” In his 1965 doctoral thesis, Hawking proved that the Big Bang, which gave birth to the universe, had to be an infinitely small point where the laws of physics don’t apply. This “singularity theorem” ignited his career. During the 1970s and ’80s, he produced spectacular, highly mathematical discoveries on black holes and the early universe that dazzled colleagues. Due to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, his strength began declining in the 1960s, and by the ’80s, he was entirely paralyzed and unable to talk. Britain’s National Health Service paid basic medical expenses, but only a rich man could have afforded the army of attendants that allowed him to live at home, work, communicate, socialize, and travel the world. Fortunately, he had become an international celebrity and author of the blockbuster 1988 bestseller, A Brief History of Time. This eased his financial troubles at the time, but they persisted for the remainder of his life. Many of his subsequent books were “carelessly edited” knockoffs designed to make money, and Hawking often endorsed products in exchange for cash. As Seife demonstrates, the public and a worshipful media ignored his discoveries but obsessed about his disability, personal life, and his “pronouncements.” Any scandal, such as his “yen for strip clubs,” added to the legend. The last of many movies about him, The Theory of Everything (2014), was “a tear-jerker of a love story.” The author’s excellent explanation of Hawking’s science makes this a top-notch biography of a significant scientific figure, but Seife also produces a uniquely disturbing portrait of deliberate mythmaking.
An unflattering yet outstanding biography of a giant of 20th-century physics.Pub Date: April 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5416-1837-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2021
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
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