Rating: 
Summary: Very readable
Review: Newton is your hero in the first half of the book and somehow in the second part, the story loses steam. For the price, I think it's ok. A mistake that all 'Newton' books tend to make is to eulogize Newton to a point where the achievements of the other greats like Fermat take a backstage. Gleick certainly did better here than with his Feynman story.
Rating: 
Summary: Newton was not a Newtonian
Review: One of the aspirations of my life is to come to a layman's understanding of science. One general aspect of learning and teaching that has always fascinated me has been the ability to present a subject matter in such a fashion that despite its complexity, can be understood by presenting simple metaphor and building concepts in a linear fashion leading to comprehension. A dream of mine would be someday to teach general history survey courses in college, and perhaps in High School as well, and do so in such a fashion that was both exciting, inspiring and educational. Anyway, science is an area that I am trying to build up an understanding of. I have a friend who inspires me, he is a bona fide a nuclear physicist and it always amazes me at his scientific knowledge. In pursuit of understanding I set off to read this biography.Gleick has written a terse and dense biography of one of the most intellectually influential "scientists" of the "modern" era. I write scientist and modern in quotes to denote that our perception is particular skewed with the latent meaning we bring to both of those concepts and that not only is it not clear that Newton associated himself with either terms, it is certain that his world view was very different from our own. One particularly striking point along these lines, was the fact that Newton was avid in his pursuit of alchemy, although this fact was not known till long after his death. In the current Newtonian world of formalized science there is a clear distinction between the reputable study of the elements known as chemistry and the disreputable unscientific magical study of alchemy. But Newton lived in a pre-Newtonian world. Newton himself was not a Newtonian, in all the sense that we think of the word. Gleick makes Newton accessible. He distills an essence of Newton, and skillfully presents vista's into Newton's life, in a short 191 pages of a very small book whose dimensions are only 8 by 5 1/2 inches. This is amended by 47 pages of footnotes as well as 18 pages of acknowledgment and sources. I am not knocking the size, merely noting its shape. Gleick is a great writer, mostly pulling off a well written and understandable presentation of Newton, his research, writings and habits. He has done a great service, for Newton was a prodigious writer. Tucked away in one of the last footnotes of the book is an enlightening quote regarding one of Newton's books described as a "work of colossal tedium...read today only by the tiniest remnant who for their sins must pass through its purgatory". Gleick notes that Newton had written a million words prior to the publication of one. Newton was a very isolated and withdrawn individual who often would spend days in his room, and he prodigiously copied entire books, paraphrasing and filling volumes with his own writing. Writing seemed a vehicle for focusing and organizing his thought processes. Much of his writing was never published, and so this biography in many ways allows a view of man whose breadth otherwise would be inaccessible to save but a remnant, if not by the staggering volume, then the inscrutable intellectualism. One final point that struck me was how much of the modern world view, that I am so much akin to, is grounded in Newtonian principles. Gleick notes that "What Newton learned entered into the marrow of what we know without knowing how we know it." Namely a reducible universe, with first causes, and laws that govern behavior in a universal fashion. First principles and universal gravity have at their philosophical underpinnings fundamental principles that are the very fabric of the way we perceive the world. Post Script, while Newton described and laid bare the laws of the universe, he could not do so without wonder and mystery. Gravity had no known cause, no known agent as its first principle, Newton noted this "question I have left to the consideration of my readers" And so it goes.
Rating:
Summary: Enigmatic Newton
Review: Over 350 years biographies on Newton have dealt with facts or speculations about his heretical beliefs and personal oddities. Gleick has achieved something astonishingly different. As with his biography of Feynman, he probes the mind of Newton, but without the benefit of accessible acquaintances. Through vignettes such as Newton watching a tennis match, Gleick teasingly reveals some of the enigma of Newton. He places us on a bench in Cambridge, or on a seat at the Royal Society, in awe of a resurrected, living mystery.
Rating:
Summary: A Work of Genius
Review: Sir Isaac Newton truly was, in Gleick's happy phrase, "chief architect of the modern world". As with Gleick's previous scientific biography ("Genius", a life of Richard Feynman), one struggles to understand how a genius at understanding and interpreting the natural world was able to put it in mathematical language. This is difficult to convey, and Gleick does not succeed. Perhaps no one could. In every other way, this biography itself is a work of genius. Newton was a turning point in the Western world-view. In a sense, he made civil, mechanical, and even electronic engineering possible. When you look at brilliant scientists or inventors, you can ask if their discoveries or inventions would have been made by someone else, perhaps within only a few years. In most cases (perhaps even in Feynman's), the answer is yes. With Newton we cannot be so sure. Of course Leibniz discovered, or invented (and that is an interesting epistemological fine point), calculus independently of Newton, but would the realization of our current large-scale model of the physical universe have come about without Newton? We cannot be sure. Gleick makes this point, and does it with sensitivity to the context of 17th century England and Europe. Newton was not of our age, the English language as it was written then is subtly and not-so-subtly different from ours (though we believe we can understand it). One of Gleick's strong points is that he adopts a style that leads the careful reader into a beginning of an understanding of 17th century language, beliefs, and thought. What would have happened without Newton? Perhaps a very different world, perhaps better, perhaps worse. This Gleick addresses, and you cannot imagine a more academic scientific biographer doing so.
Rating:
Summary: A Work of Genius
Review: Sir Isaac Newton truly was, in Gleick's happy phrase, "chief architect of the modern world". As with Gleick's previous scientific biography ("Genius", a life of Richard Feynman), one struggles to understand how a genius at understanding and interpreting the natural world was able to put it in mathematical language. This is difficult to convey, and Gleick does not succeed. Perhaps no one could. In every other way, this biography itself is a work of genius. Newton was a turning point in the Western world-view. In a sense, he made civil, mechanical, and even electronic engineering possible. When you look at brilliant scientists or inventors, you can ask if their discoveries or inventions would have been made by someone else, perhaps within only a few years. In most cases (perhaps even in Feynman's), the answer is yes. With Newton we cannot be so sure. Of course Leibniz discovered, or invented (and that is an interesting epistemological fine point), calculus independently of Newton, but would the realization of our current large-scale model of the physical universe have come about without Newton? We cannot be sure. Gleick makes this point, and does it with sensitivity to the context of 17th century England and Europe. Newton was not of our age, the English language as it was written then is subtly and not-so-subtly different from ours (though we believe we can understand it). One of Gleick's strong points is that he adopts a style that leads the careful reader into a beginning of an understanding of 17th century language, beliefs, and thought. What would have happened without Newton? Perhaps a very different world, perhaps better, perhaps worse. This Gleick addresses, and you cannot imagine a more academic scientific biographer doing so.
Rating:
Summary: Newton's Genius as a foundation for more discoveries..
Review: The Genius of Newton has laid the foundation for many other discoveries. This book explains them like no other. The content is well written and precise. I would also strongly recommend reading "History: Fiction or Science?" Today its author-mathematician Anatoly Fomenko follows in Newton's steps on the revision of chronology, and fearlessly tackles the falsification of antiquity with astronomy and mathematics.
A must if you prefer facts to speculation. Again Sir Newton : thank you!!
Rating:
Summary: WOW!
Review: The other reviewers have succinctly and eloquently summed up this book about Newton. In our society, we bandy about the word "great" and apply it to anyone who can throw a ball through a hoop. This book shows what greatness really is.
Rating:
Summary: excellent
Review: There is something to be said about a book, such as Gleick's Isaac Newton, when one can read it on the beach. That is not to say that Gleick is light on substance, or that this is a typical 'beach read'. But, it is to say that the economy of his prose, the clarity of his thought, and the rigor of his analysis is always interesting, and always illuminating.
The one complaint I have about the book is that Gleick frequently tries to adduce what precisely Newton was thinking at various points in time. This is an interesting attempt at trying to contextualizing a confounding man (what genius other than Newton has been so apparently devoid of ego as to wish his work not to be published?) But, it is not clear to me how, given a lack of contemporary accounts of Newton's state of mind (Freud and William James did not create psychology when Newton was alive) Gleick can claim to understand the nature of Newton's character.
That said, any effort to contextualize Newton is obviously an interesting one, if only because of his historical importance.
Rating:
Summary: The Gleick we Like is back
Review: There was a time when James Gleick could do no wrong. Chaos, in 1987, established Gleick as the nonfiction writer who understood abstract science, but more importantly, could present it to the masses in compelling narratives. The originality of Chaos lay in Gleick's methodology: portray the men and explain the math. This winning formula made Chaos a bestseller, and soon chaos math, which no one had ever heard of before, was on everyone's lips (recall Jeff Goldblum as a chaos theory mathematician in Jurassic Park). Five years later, Gleick finished another bestseller, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman. Repeating the form of Chaos, Genius traced the career of Nobel-prizewinning physicist Richard Feynman while explaining Feynman's work, from the principles of the atomic bomb, which the young Feynman worked on at Los Alamos during World War II, to the flawed O-Rings that doomed the space shuttle Challenger in 1986, a disaster which Feynman investigated near the end of his life. With his first two books, Gleick had created a new style of scientific biography (which continues to be popular-- one example is Sylvia Nasar's A Beautiful Mind) and established himself as the undisputed master of the form But then came the late nineties, the Internet, and descent. An amateur pilot, Gleick crashed his small airplane in 1997. He lost a leg, but worse, his young adopted son, who died in the accident. Enduring months of rehab, his new prosthetic leg, and the death some people blamed him for, Gleick turned his research increasingly toward the Internet. In 1999 he published Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything, which attempted to analyze how "everything," from reading to sex, is faster in this crazy day and age. Like most books about "everything," however, Faster amounted to little more than a laundry list, and disappointed most of his readers. His next book, What Just Happened: A Chronicle from the Information Frontier, which collected his published articles on the emerging online world, was more successful, but ultimately as unmemorable as most books on "the Information Frontier." With Isaac Newton, however, the Gleick we like is back. In Newton, Gleick has chosen a mind which eclipses even Feynman and the eccentric, brilliant boys of Chaos. Much like Shakespeare, however, the shadows of centuries have obscured the man himself, and we are forced to approach Newton from his various interests: Newton the mathematician, Newton the theologian, Newton the historian, Newton the master of the Mint (Gleick especially relishes portraying Newton the alchemist, a field which, in the 17th century, had yet to part ways with empirical chemistry, even asserting that Newton was not merely an alchemical amateur, but "in the breadth of his knowledge and his experimentation, the peerless alchemist of Europe.")... Yet these many snapshots of Newton, each from a different angle, never congeal, never triangulate. Newton remains a sphinx whose mystery, it seems, will now never be solved. Why did the man who invented calculus not publish his findings for decades? What drove him, in his studies on optics, to stare at the sun for so long he nearly blinded himself? We have no answers, but Gleick is not to blame for Newton's opacity. His choice of Newton as a subject, however, is mildly disappointing. Gleick was once known for breaking the story, an intrepid reporter explaining to the rest of us just what is going on in government research programs and the halls of academia, but instead of Gleick's thrilling old show and tell, we are left, in the end, with One More Isaac Newton book. On its dust-jacket Isaac Newton claims to be, "More than biography, more than history, more than science," but often amounts to less than each.
Rating: 
Summary: Doesn't capture enough of the inner-Newton
Review: There were moments in this book, but overall I was left a bit disappointed by the author's lack of insight into the man himself. I have always held Newton in awe, and wondered what his IQ might have measured. Perhaps what I was looking for in this book was not the author's intent in focus. I've read many scientific books that detail the theories and history of Newton's contributions. In this book I hoped to find more of an inner glimpse into Newton's psyche. What it did reveal was disillusioning--Newton was apparently petty, jealous, and socially inept. For those who are looking for a biography, this doesn't cut the mustard. For those who are not already familiar with the scientific thought of the day and with Newton's accomplishments, this book will be much more satisfying.
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