This work is the result of a personal experiment by American writer, publisher and computer software guru John Brockman, who decided to find out what sort of book would result if he asked 27 of the world's most eminent scientists to write about their childhoods and answer the question: "What happened when you were a kid that led you to pursue a life in science?".

Brockman's scientists are drawn from a range of disciplines - though psychology is perhaps over-represented - and include quantum gravity specialist Lee Smolin, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, mathematician Steven Strogatz and cosmologist Paul Davies. He says he first began thinking about the book on Christmas Day 2002 when he spent the afternoon "in a long rambling conversation with [Nobel Laureate in Physics] Murray Gell-Mann, discussing his childhood".

The essays Brockman has collated from the scientists themselves - including, of course, Gell-Mann - are up to a dozen pages long and entertainingly diverse. British psychologist Nicholas Humphrey evokes the powerful influence of both grandfathers, who gave him "a sense of intellectual entitlement", while Paul Davies recounts the early experiments with telescopes (and the terrors of knife-throwing) in bleak post-war London that led him, slowly but inexorably, to pursue a life in theoretical physics.

There's plenty to amuse in these anecdotal biographies.

Evolutionist Lynn Margulis remembers the young Carl Sagan as "tall, handsome in a sort of galooty way", and Richard Dawkins recovers from disappointing his entrenchedly naturalist family to discover his own route into the earth sciences via the fictional Dr Dolittle, the works of Darwin and the common ground he fi nds between the two.

There is also the candour of disappointment. Lee Smolin recounts choosing a career as an architect after his early attempts to become a physicist were thwarted. He was enticed back by the questions Einstein left unanswered - quantum theory and its relationship to relativity.

Brockman says his goal in compiling the book was to provide readers with insight into the early lives of some of the most interesting thinkers on the planet, "and to motivate and inspire." His subjects tend to be established figures, many from the middle classes in the brave new worlds of the U.S. and U.K. in the 1950s and '60s.

But the limitations of cultural background are overshadowed by more powerful themes: among them the love of books, the determination to succeed and a belief in the values of science.