Stephen Hawking is the world’s most famous living scientist for two reasons that (despite his own wishes in the matter) are impossible to disentangle. The first is his disability, a motor neuron disease related to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, often referred to as Lou Gehrig’s disease) that, beginning in his late teens, has rendered him severely disabled. Most people, when diagnosed with ALS, live only a few more years; Hawking has survived for 49, turning 70 on Jan. 8. The second source of renown is his work as a theoretical physicist and cosmologist, particularly on the nature of black holes and the origin of the universe.
Even people with no inclination to tackle the brain-bending concepts Hawking outlines in his bestselling 1988 book, “A Brief History of Time,” find his personal story inspiring. In that light, scientific preoccupations they might dismiss as arcane and impractical in an able-bodied person become a metaphor for the human ability to transcend limits. As Hawking himself says in the three-part documentary series “Into the Universe With Stephen Hawking” (you can stream it on Netflix), “Although I cannot move, and have to speak through a computer, in my mind I am free.”
Kitty Ferguson’s “Stephen Hawking: An Unfettered Mind,” as you might be able to guess from its title, fully subscribes to this view, and who can blame her? It is largely the truth about Hawking’s remarkable life. This is the second biography of Hawking that Ferguson has written — the first was published in 1991. A former neighbor of the scientist and his family in Cambridge, England, she also assisted him with his 2001 book, “The Universe in a Nutshell.” “Stephen Hawking: An Unfettered Mind” has both the advantages and the disadvantages of a biography written from such close quarters.
Posted by Den 
