My Brief History

Stephen Hawking is one of the most brilliant cosmologists of our time, and author of the 10 million copy bestselling A Brief History of Time, one of the iconic books of its generation. Now, for the first time, he tells the story of his own life in his own words, in a book expanded from a lecture of the same name.

“When you are faced with an early death,” writes Stephen Hawking, “it makes you realize that life is worth living and that there are lots of things you want to do.” From his postwar childhood in London through his undergraduate years at Oxford, Hawking was smart but (according to him) undistinguished, not even the brightest child of his brilliant, eccentric parents. A great lover of jokes and bets, he made an art of doing as little work as possible. All that changed, however, when Hawking received a diagnosis of Lou Gehrig’s disease, or ALS, at the age of twenty-one, and began his transformation into the (still fun-loving) explorer and explainer of the universe that we know today.

Written with wit, humility, and warmth, My Brief History gives us a candid examination of a life well-lived, including insight into his marriages and family life as well as a portrait of his intellectual evolution. The result is an unprecedented glimpse inside the mind of one of the most world-changing people of our time.