Einstein: His Life and Universe

Yet another Einstein biography? Yes, but each of them catches a different beam of light, as if from a multifaceted gemstone, observed through the author’s set of special eyeglasses. Thus, one of the early biographies, full of intimate details, was published in 1930 by a certain Rudolf Kayser, a name that turned out to be the pseudonym of Einstein’s close-by son-in-law, Anton Reiser. Philipp Frank’s Einstein: His life and Times (1947), to this day one of the best, was filtered through his spectacles of logical empiricism. Einstein’s own extraordinary Autobiographical Notes of 1949 omitted all (merely personal) details. In his book of 1971, Ronald Clark seemed periodically to be astonished that such great physics should have been done by a Jew. Abraham Pais’s intellectual feast of 1982, Subtle is the Lord, contained a strong whiff of antiphilosophy. And for some years more recently, helped by a badly flawed PBS...