Stephen Hawking's unusual celebrity

Mr Seife has performed an important service by documenting Stephen Hawking's life as it actually happened.

Stephen Hawking was, by a wide margin, the best-known figure from the world of science from the mid-1980s until his death in 2018. Hawking Hawking, by the accomplished science journalist and historian Charles Seife, is a tough-minded portrait of the theoretical physicist. Taken literally, though, the book’s provocative title is misleading: it is a full-fledged biography, not an exposé or takedown. But the title accurately captures the book’s iconoclastic spirit. This is not another contribution to the vast Hawking hagiography.
 
Let me briefly recall the basic facts of Hawking’s life. In 1942 he was born in Oxford, England, into