Description

No man—not Hitler, not Gandhi, not Franklin D. Roosevelt—did more to shape and reshape the twentieth century than Albert Einstein. His ideas exploded centuries of established physics, paving the way for electronics, space exploration, and the atomic bomb. The very device on which you read this blurb would not exist without his work. But amazingly, Einstein’s influence didn’t stop with his scientific ideas; he also became a pre-eminent advocate for world peace and nuclear disarmament, and was offered the presidency of the new state of Israel.

In this readable, compact biography, Alexander Kennedy surveys every aspect of this complex, towering figure that pop culture too often reduces to a cartoon absent-minded professor or Apple advertisement. By exploring the darker corners of Einstein’s life—such as the way anti-Semitism shaped his childhood, and the nastiness of his 1919 divorce from Mileva Maric—readers come away with a renewed sense of wonder at his many triumphs. Written with the lay reader in mind, Einstein: A Life of Genius includes readily understandable explanations of even advanced theories such as general relativity. By the end, we not only understand how Albert Einstein’s genius has shaped our past, but how it continues to shape the future of our species as well.

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.” – Albert Einstein