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Einstein: His Life and Universe Reviews

Customer Rating:
Summary: Great Read!
Comment: Just as he did with "Franklin", Isaacson takes a well chronicled subject and finds new and interesting facts and anecdotes never before published. A must read.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent Biography, not a stand alone physics text
Comment: I am writing as someone who has taken classical/modern physics courses (though now years ago). This Einstein biography is comprehensive in terms of his personal life and interactions with other physicists of the time (good sections on the various conferences). It is also very thorough on Einstein's politics, which does significantly contribute to the overall picture of his life, as he was involved in many causes. I would disagree with some reviewers, I felt like the overall flow of the book is consistent. Probably the weakest point is its discussion of the physics itself. This is the difficulty of a biography of someone like Einstein - include enough physics to make the biography complete, without turning into a physics text for PhDs. I feel like the author undershot the mark on this a little bit and could have included a few more pages on discussion. I found myself doing a lot of cross-referencing with physics books. Nonetheless, it's a highly readable book and probably will be the life of Einstein book for years to come.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: An excellent biography of the man even if the sections about the science are a little difficult to get through
Comment: Walter Isaacson's in-depth bio of Einstein was a fascinating read--at least for someone like me who did not know a lot about the man going in. This is not an easy book to plow through.

Isaacson does not do the best job of making Einstein's scientific accomplishments and efforts accessible to the layman. But the balance of the book--and the vast majority is non-scientific gives real insight into the way the mind of one of the most brilliant people in history operated.

Isaacson paints Einstein as an interesting dichotomy. While he created a warm, humorous and accessible public persona, he was distant with his own family. His choppy relationships with his first wife, is uneven relationship with his older son, Hans Edward, his often-unsubtle extra-marital affairs stand in stark contrast to his public demonstrations of gentle humor, concern for equality for all people and involvement in civil rights and Zionism efforts.

It is an endlessly interesting tale of an interesting man. I recommend it strongly.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Understanding Einstein
Comment: Many people consider Albert Einstein the smartest man who ever lived. While that may be true in the world of science, the book Einstein: His Life and Universe certainly shows that it wasn't true in other areas of his life. He's a man who dumped his first wife to marry his cousin. His relationship with his sons was tenuous at best. He was a pacifist until faced with the alternative. Einstein: His Life and Universe is a book that paints a full picture of the man behind the theories. He was a person who could be a great friend to others and yet he seems to have kept himself oddly aloof from the world.

For the most part, I enjoyed the book, but trying to understand Einstein's scientific theories, although Walter Isaacson did his best to explain them in layman's terms, still gave me a headache at times.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Wonderful
Comment: An enlightening look at Einstein's life from birth to death and everythinig inbetween. There was just enough discusion of physics to give you a background, but comprehendable to the non-physists of the world. The author covered the creation of the theory of relativity, but it was not the focus of the book. It rather focused on Einstein's aproach to life, his way of thinking and philosophies that caused him to create his theories. I found the book a comprehensive view of his life and entirely enjoyable.

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