I was eagerly anticipating A New Kind of Science and bought it when it was first available. But it was a tremendously aggravating read. It was repetitive, inconclusive, and far longer than the material merited. I came away thinking Wolfram must have set some kind of record for use of the personal pronoun "I" in a book, including autobiographies. The egotism shines through that much. Perhaps this accounts for the perception that nobody else gets credit in Wolfram's book.

This was how I thought before I read any reviews or heard anything other than laudatory things about Wolfram. Until I read the reviews I thought there might be something terribly wrong with my understanding of what I just read.