Sometimes the Good Doctor fell just a little short of great.

The idea here is excellent: Capsule biographies of the world's greatest scientists, written in Isaac Asimov's clear and straightforward style. It is a useful compendium, and probably the best-written set of short scientific biographies available.

There are a few problems, though. One is the obvious one that the book is now dramatically out-of-date -- with science progressing so fast, many extremely important scientists are not included. To take an obvious example, there is no entry on Peter Higgs, who proposed the Higgs Boson and was the most recent Nobel winner for physics as of when this review was written. Higgs simply came along too late to be included.

Of course, the book could be updated, or information about more recent scientists could be found online. That's really rather minor. More disturbing to me is the lack of insight into the characters of the people involved. Take Marie Curie. Curie was probably autistic, certainly depressive, obsessive, and very possibly had a love affair after her husband's death. Asimov couldn't have known she was autistic, but he should have described the depression and at least mentioned the Langevin affair -- it brought her a lot of very bad publicity. The "biography" of Curie falls dramatically short of true biography. This is probably true of some of the other biographies as well, although I can't always judge the matter.

And there are some factual errors. Not a lot -- I don't remember the relatively few examples I saw, whereas I certain remember a number of the whitewashes. But there were enough that I think one must always check another source before quoting Asimov's facts.

That doesn't change the fact that this is a good introduction to the lives and accomplishments of scientists, or the fact that it is highly readable. If you want a casual reference, go for it. Just don't treat it as the last word. ( )

This is a great introduction to science through biographies. Asimov is highly readable as always. He gives short biographies of 1500 of the greatest scientists in history. This is a worthy addition to the shelf of any fan of history, science, or biography.