When you read a book, a good book, you get fully engrossed in the lives of the characters. It is like a short but powerful relationship that you have with them. When you pick up a memoir by Michelle Obama, there is a lot of expectation baggage at the beginning itself. I am a fan of team Obama. I have seen all possible YouTube videos of them; speeches, campaign footage, interviews, dances, karaoke performances, dinners, street interactions; I follow them on social media and a couple of years back I read Dreams From My Father by Barack Obama which was quite insightful as well. Despite these impressions already formed, this book made me admire and respect them even more. In her memoir, Michelle Obama talks about the experiences in her life that made her what she is. How she became. While political experiences are obviously a part of her narration, she does not write about politics or advocate a side. Instead, she writes about values, people, reactions, thoughts. It is really a mesmerizi
A more descriptive title would be “Brief Discussions” for Hawking has few definite answers and the whole book is short – about 50 000 words, I estimate. The most interesting chapters for me were the purely scientific ones; on Black Holes and time travel. However, I was disappointed that, on page 93, Hawking explains the Uncertainty Principle incorrectly. He describes it as the impossibility of measuring the position of a particle (e.g. an electron) without disturbing its speed by shining a quantum of light on it. This is true but it is not the Uncertainty Principle which says that a sub-atomic particle does not have a precisely defined position and momentum (due to its wave-nature). As other reviewers have noted, there is quite a lot of repetition; the last two chapters could have usefully been edited into one. Hawking can sometimes be quite naïve, as when he suggest that Artificial Intelligence will help us eradicate poverty. If we had the collective will, we could have eliminated p