Recounts Stephen Hawking's improbable journey, from his postwar London boyhood to his years of international acclaim and celebrity. Writing with characteristic humility and humor, Hawking opens up about the challenges that confronted him following his diagnosis of ALS at age 21. Tracing his progress as a thinker, he explains how the prospect of an early death urged him onward through numerous intellectual breakthroughs, and talks about the genesis of his masterpiece A Brief History of Time.

Hawking recounts his improbable journey from postwar London boyhood to his years of international acclaim and celebrity. A candid account which introduces readers to a Hawking rarely glimpsed in previous books: the inquisitive schoolboy whose classmates nicknamed him Einstein and the young husband and father struggling to gain a foothold in the world of physics and cosmology. Hawking opens up about the challenges that confronted him following his diagnosis of ALS, and explains how the prospect of an early death urged him onward through numerous intellectual breakthroughs.