The story of Albert Einstein's life calls for a protean biographer, not to mention a fearless one. Conveying the magnitude of Einstein's scientific achievements is tough enough, but that's just the start. His geopolitics, faith, cultural impact, philosophy of science, amorous affairs, powers of abstraction and superstar reputation are all part of this subject. So are the two world wars through which Einstein lived and the internecine physics-world struggles in which he became embroiled.
Then there are the odd quirks and the pricelessly prophetic anecdotes, as when one Zurich classmate of the budding genius went home to tell his parents that "this Einstein will one day be a great man." Many of these need to be included, and matters of scale make this job dauntingly difficult too. Einstein's earth-shaking concept of general relativity is directly juxtaposed, in Walter Isaacson's confidently authoritative Einstein: His Life and Universe, with a set of household rules that the great man wrote to keep his first wife at bay. "You will stop talking to me if I request it," this document asserted. "You will not expect any intimacy from me, nor will you reproach me in any way."
Isaacson deals clearly and comfortably with the scope of Einstein's life. If his highly readable and informative book has an Achilles' heel, it's in the area of science. Isaacson had the best available help (most notably the physicist Brian Greene) in explicating the series of revelations Einstein brought forth in his wonder year, 1905, and the subsequent problems with quantum theory and uncertainty that would bedevil him.
But these sections of the book are succinctly abbreviated. Paradoxically that makes them less accessible than they would have been through longer, more patient explication. Still, the cosmic physics would be heavy sledding in any book chiefly devoted to Einstein's life and times, and Isaacson acknowledges that. "OK, it's not easy," he writes, "but that's why we're no Einstein and he was."
In his introduction to Einstein, Isaacson sounds dangerously as if he is again trumpeting the virtues of a founding father (his last book was a biography of Benjamin Franklin). "Tyranny repulsed him, and he saw tolerance not simply as a sweet virtue but as a necessary condition for a creative society," he proclaims. Whiffs of a textbook tone are similarly alarming. ("Einstein would become a supporter of world federalism, internationalism, pacificism, and democratic socialism, with a strong devotion to individual liberty and freedom of expression.") But overall this is a warm, insightful, affectionate portrait with a human and immensely charming Einstein at its core.
"Oh my! That Johnnie boy!/So crazy with desire/While thinking of his Dollie/His pillow catches fire." That was a poem written by the love-struck future patent clerk of Bern, Switzerland (he would spend seven years in that job while writing his greatest scientific papers) to Mileva Maric, the first of two women he would marry. (To dissolve this union, the ever-confident Einstein offered Maric the money from a Nobel Prize he had not yet won.) It reveals a different side of Einstein than his famous "On a Heuristic Point of View Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light" did.
But in Isaacson's artfully seamless account, the genius and the flirt are remarkably well reconciled. And that first marriage was based on both. "I can already imagine the fun we will have," he wrote to Maric about a prospective vacation. "And then we'll start in on Helmholtz's electromagnetic theory of light."
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