Newton is a far more facinating figure than I had known before picking up Gleick’s spry biography. Cloistered by himself in his Cambridge room for much of his professional life, Newton was almost the cliché of the ivory-tower academic.

Gleick opens for the reader, however, much of Newton’s life that was hardly cliché. He was an intense alchemist, and his prowess in the secret sciences was remarkable. Newton wrote and thought a great deal about theology, and was nearly cast out of Cambridge for his anti-Trinitarian beliefs. He was also involved in politics, serving as Master of the Mint for the British crown.

The heart of Newton’s life, for the contemporary observer, was his mathematical genius. His was a talent that stood above a host of contempories justly famous in their own right: Halley, Descartes, Leibnitz, Locke. Gleick revels in these relationships, showing Newton’s vanity along with his greatness.

There is unavoidably some math and science in this book, but nothing that’s terribly difficult to comprehend, even for a reader like me whose Mathematics education effectively ended in high school. It’s a quick and lively read, informative without pretensions of being definitive.