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Two biographies, with two unique approaches, chronicle the humanness and historical context of his remarkable life.
Einstein
His Life and Universe
By Walter Isaacson
Simon & Schuster. 704 pp. $32
Einstein
A Biography
By Jürgen Neffe
Translated by Shelley Frisch
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 480 pp. $30
Reviewed by Richard Di Dio
Philadelphia Inquirer - Sunday, May 20, 2007
Just two years ago, the world celebrated the 100th anniversary of Albert Einstein's annus mirabilis. For many learning his story for the first time, the image that emerged was of a saintly savant whose physics grand slam was announced on a flickering newsreel . . .
Bern, Switzerland, 1905. At age 26, Albert Einstein, junior patent clerk, has published four breakthrough papers in less than a year, each of breathtaking originality, each potentially Nobel Prize-worthy. Einstein's results help verify the existence of atoms, explain the quantum nature of light, and supplant Newton's dynamics with the Special Theory of Relativity.
The incredible story of 1905 should only whet one's appetite for more about Einstein, whose celebrity and world influence justifiably made him Time magazine's Person of the Century. His life was marked with unimaginable successes and disappointing failures in many areas besides science - including, as frankly portrayed in two important new biographies, matters of love and lust.
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