A quick breezy read good for an evening; Levenson touches on the highlights of Newton's early life & throughout keeps an eye out for the telling detail or quote which might bring the past to life for us, is sympathetic towards the alchemy and tries to put it in a context, and then plunges into Newton's war with an obscure counterfeiter.

This section would make good background reading for Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle (despite Levenson's book being published in 2009 and the cycle finished in 2004, and the latter being one of the few places a reader might have encountered Newton in the same breath as counterfeiters, entirely unmentioned), as it pretty clearly explains the monetary issues of clipping, recoining, balance of exchange with Asia, etc, in a less digressive & action-packed manner than Stephenson's doorstoppers.

It's interesting that Newton was so involved in criminal matters, but in some respects Levenson is trying to wring blood from a stone: Newton doesn't seem to have been any Sherlock Holmes (an apt comparison since Moriarty was an expert on Newtonian mechanics), but rather, just obsessive & hardworking and applying all the standard investigative techniques. The story is hampered also by the relatively low amount of documentation (one wonders what the boxes of documents Newton burned would have revealed).