This would narrow down the variety of readers. The only con about this book is that the language, especially the scientific jargon used to describe Newton’s discoveries, was sometimes difficult to comprehend. The sad fact about this is that Newton’s “ugly story” of cheating Leibniz was discovered only years after the death of Newton. Newton’s life as a legendary scientist, or “natural philosopher”, intrigued me a lot and showed me a side of Newton I had never anticipated! It saddened me! I didn’t know that Newton, considered a respectable member of the Royal Society of London, indirectly led a young scientist, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, to suicide due to bad and unthoughtful communications around the invention of Calculus by both of them. The major events in Newton’s life were portrayed using extremely evocative words, making his life story play like a movie in my mind. The biography, “Isaac Newton”, by Gale E. This book captures both sides of this truly extraordinary man.

Newton was an authentic genius with all too human faults. Christianson also explores Newton's less savory side, including his long, bitter feud with Robert Hooke and the underhanded way that Newton established his priority in the invention of calculus and tarnished Liebniz's reputation. Turned from a dilettante's club into an eminent scientific organization. The book sheds light on Newton's later life as master of the mint in London, where he managed to convict and hang the arch criminal William Chaloner (a remarkable turn for a once reclusive scholar), and his presidency of the Royal Society, which he Christianson describes Newton's creation of the first working model of the reflecting telescope, which brought him to the attention of the Royal Society, and he illuminates the eighteen months of intense labor that resulted in his Principia, arguably the most important scientific work ever published. There ensued two miraculous years at home in Woolsthorpe Manor, where he fled when plague threatened Cambridge, a remarkably fertile period when Newton formulated his theory of gravity, a new theory of light, and calculus-all by his twenty-fourth birthday. We follow Newton from his childhood in rural England to his student days at Cambridge, where he devoured the works of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, and taught himself mathematics. Christianson paints an engaging portrait of Newton and the times in which he lived.

Now, in this fast-paced, colorful biography, Gale E.

Quarrelsome and quirky, a disheveled recluse who ate little, slept less, and yet had an iron constitution, Isaac Newton rose from a virtually illiterate family to become one of the towering intellects of science.

Isaac Newton by Gale E. Christianson