As a genre, celebrity biographies are consistently entertaining so long as the reader abides by a single rule: put the book down when the celebrity enters rehab. People get famous and make bad decisions in different ways, but everyone gets sober and boring the same way. Unfortunately, Charles Seife’s new book about Stephen Hawking titled Hawking Hawking: The Selling of a Scientific Celebrity cannot be read that way. Stephen Hawking never got too wild, and Seife never quite decides what his book is about. The title (a bit too clever, I might add, as the cover just includes the word “Hawking” above and below an image of Stephen, not making the meaning clear; at least italicize the first “Hawking” and put them side by side so everyone can see the intent) makes it sound as if the book should be about how the publishing in dustry, and/or Hawking’s family, turned Stephen Hawking into an international celebrity. However, the book reads much more like an ordinary scientific biography. Seife’s narrative is lively, but any reader familiar with Hawking’s life already can put the book down about Chapter 12, when Stephen and Jane visit Caltech in the 1970s before the fame, as this is when Seife’s central thesis seems to end.
It should be stated in the beginning that Seife proposes nothing new about Hawking. Among the scientifically literate, Hawking was never considered a historical figure like Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Einstein, Godel, or Heisenberg. For example, James Gleick’s 1992 biography Genius: Richard Feynman and Modern Physics contains this paragraph: