by Stephen Hawking
What do you do for an encore after your first major book sells more than 1 million copies in hardcover and spins off paperback and movie deals? If you're British physicist Stephen Hawking, you try writing a book that people can actually read. Hawking's A Brief History of Time (1988) went platinum not for its contents—a discourse on imaginary time and other arcane topics that even other physicists found hard to follow—but because of Hawking himself. Diagnosed in his early 20s with ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease, Hawking, 51, is totally paralyzed, able to communicate by tapping out messages laboriously with the fingers of one hand on a touchscreen voice synthesizer. Yet his ruminations about the universe have made him one of the world's leading physicists. Those who could not get through his first book may still be curious about its author. Despite its title, Black Holes and Baby Universes, a collection of essays that Hawking has produced over the past 16 years, goes a long way toward satisfying that curiosity. There is plenty of quantum astrophysics and such, but nearly half of the book is autobiographical. Hawking talks, with absolute honesty and occasional humor, about his early years, his experience with ALS and how he came to write a mega-best-seller. There is even a transcript of Hawking's appearance on the BBC radio show Desert Island Discs, in which a public figure talks about eight records he'd take into exile. Among Hawking's choices: Mozart's Requiem, "Please Please Me" by the Beatles, and Edith Piaf's "Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien." In English, that's "No, I Don't Regret a Thing"—and this quietly moving book makes clear why, despite Hawking's terrible physical disability, that lyric sums up his attitude. (Bantam, $21.95)
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