A connected issue is that of privacy: While Christianson notes that Barbara Tuchman and many others have staunchly defended the limits of investigation, he points out that ``the biographer is necessarily intrusive.'' These edgy topics and others are illustrated by the author's experiences while writing lives of Sir Isaac Newton and Loren Eiseley, both of whom were difficult subjects (Christianson describes Newton as ``an emotional eunuch,'' and says that Eiseley's autobiographical writings were fraught with extensive dissembling). Most worrisome is the biographer's relation to his subject: Adversary? Advocate? Christianson argues that the biographer must identify with his subject-even if the subject happens to be Adolf Hitler. Biography, it seems, is an enterprise fraught with dangers, and in these 13 essays, Christianson (History/Indiana State) tackles them all. 'About this title' may belong to another edition of this title.The ins and outs of the biographer's craft, by a man who has penned several (Fox at the Wood's Edge, 1990. Newton died wealthy and celebrated, even rather less lonely through his niece, a famous beauty, and her slightly scandalous high-society circle. Of course, it includes his entire career, his litigious rivalries, his work style, so secretive and shy, and his voluminous accomplishments, until a complex emotional breakdown took him away to official London at age 52. Less a scientific biography than a personal one, it does not try to popularize Newton's physics.

The resemblance to the young Einstein at the Patent Office in Bern is evident the human differences between Newton, without wife or nearby friends, and Einstein's happier world are manifest. For almost two years, he worked alone, establishing the modern methods and much of the matter of theoretical physics for two centuries: the ideas of the calculus, its application to motion for apple and moon alike, gravitation made semiquantitative and perhaps universal, and the nature of white light and color. A new college graduate, his genius yet unrecognized, he returned home at age 22, after the university was closed by the coming of plague. He attended boarding school near his home, ranking second to last among 80 students, but he graduated at 18 the star of the school and went on to the University of Cambridge. His life was fed by his vigorous mind and hands the lonely boy read widely and filled his days with skywatching, kites, sundials, carving and model making.

Born early on Christmas morning of 1642, his illiterate father recently dead, Isaac Newton was raised by his grandmother.

Isaac Newton by Gale E. Christianson