I learned more than I thought I wanted to know about both Newton and counterfeiting. Do you know why there are ridges on the sides of coins? You will after reading this book. ( )

Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World's Greatest Scientist
by Thomas Levenson

This is a terrific and informative book about a great man of science in a field I wouldn't have guessed him to be in but like every thing else he did, he did it brilliantly! It starts with his early life that wasn't a cheerful one at all. He leaves to go away to school at 14 and never returns. He just keeps making remarkable progress but that makes enemies and those that admire his work.
He is eventually offered a job to protect the Mint. Due to all the counterfeiters of the times, this was a real issue. How the government was dealing with the problem was almost as bad. Newton didn't want the job. The pay was excellent and he couldn't say no.
There was a certain counterfeiter that was Newton's arch enemy, in a matter of speaking. They battled each other for years!
This book was wonderful in giving the reader a look at what life was like during that period and what counterfeiters were doing and how it effected everyday life. It also gave us a look at what Newton was like, a more personal, up close, look.
I enjoy history books that makes me feel like I am there and this one does! Highly recommend! ( )

This was a fun book -- a combination biography of Newton, and a true crime story. Newton teaching himself how to run a criminal investigation was of particular interest; reading the records of this incredible scientific mind as he learned criminology on the job was fascinating. Many intellectuals and scientists could never pull it off, but Newton did a brilliant job as Warden of the Mint.

The setup as "Newton versus the counterfeiter Chaloner" seemed a little contrived. Newton didn't really seem to see Chaloner as a nemesis. He was just a particularly thorny problem that had to be dealt with as part of the job. Newton never felt the need to reply to Chaloner's letters, and while the scientist got frustrated with dead ends in the case, he never seemed to actively hate Chaloner. (Chaloner obviously hated Newton, though, and their lopsided emotional investment was rather amusing at times.)

I do recommend this as an entertaining read if you're interested in Newton or in the handling of criminal cases at the end of the 17th century. Four stars. ( )

This book focuses on a part of Isaac Newton's life that never got much attention from previous biographers: his time at the Mint (i.e. the place that makes British coins) and what he did there. As the title suggests, he spent a lot of time being a detective, finding counterfeiters and bringing them to justice. But that's not the only thing he did at the Mint. He also led a massive "re-coining" operation which replaced all of Britain's old coins with newer, harder-to-counterfeit ones. It was a huge logistical and project management task, and the guy who was originally supposed to be doing it (because he got the job as a plush paid political appointment) was incompetent and uninterested.

In other words, this book could have been titled Isaac Newton, Project Manager.

The publishers probably chose a better title. ( )

The bookshop had incorrectly filed Thomas Levenson's book under Crime Fiction. That is very wrong as it is fact not fiction, but the book is not easy to classify; it is Biography, English History, History of Science, of Alchemy, of Crime, and of State Finances, with Religion, European Dynastic History and War Studies thrown in for good measure. However it is classified, this is an illuminating window into the celebrated Isaac Newton's move from academe in Cambridge to the Royal Mint in the Tower of London, and the challenges both the English currency and coinage were under as they developed towards the model familiar to us until the arrival of the internet. The story's focus is the battle of wits between the Royal Mint and the men and women making and circulating fake coinage, which Newton can be said to have won by dogged and systematic hard work, albeit not applying anything like Queensberry Rules. It is sobering to find that even Newton would lose heavily to another financial enterprise, the South Sea Bubble. ( )