“Giants of Science: Isaac Newton” Book Review

Hey, Frayed Wire readers! This is a review Josh made on his old site, but is now being moved here!

For school I have to read at least one of three books on a certain list over the summer. I was going to choose Surviving the Applewhites, but they were all checked out when I went to the library. Then I looked at The Golden Compass. Well, it is going to be a movie, right? I should read it. That’s what I was thinking until I saw how long it was. No way. That would leave no time for Harry Potter at all.

So, I ended up choosing the shortest book of them all – a 115 page biography called Giants of Science: Isaac Newton by Kathleen Krull. This book tells about Isaac Newton’s life, strange habits, inventions; so on. It really isn’t bad, and it’s a great easy-to-read book if you don’t want to tackle a huge college-level biography of the man. Kathleen Krull’s book ends up being informative and entertaining, and that’s what her goal was, right?

My only complaints are that the book kind of jumps around a bit when it comes to years. At one part Krull talks about Isaac Newton publishing a book called Opticks, but then she later mentions that his book was “finally published now, after such a long time”. Krull constantly gives us foreshadowings and snippets of what happens later, so when you finally get to the part where it actually happens, you feel confused, thinking “wait – didn’t this already happen”?

Also, Krull tells us how Newton was a strange, obsessive, and unfriendly man, but then at the end she starts going on and on about how great of a person he was. I don’t know if it was just me, but she seemed to make contradicting statements about his character. Perhaps all that stuff of how great he was was just what the public thought, but if that was so, Krull didn’t do such a good job of telling us that they were acting like Newton was better than he actually was. To me, it seemed that all Newton did was come up with a complicated set of laws and calculus (Thank you…?).

Whatever. I had to read it for school, so I didn’t have much of a choice. YOU could probably choose whether you want to read it or not, so here’s my verdict:

Final Score: 7.5 out of 10

Read it if you want to find out more about Isaac Newton in an easy-to-understand manner.

By Josh60502