Simply Einstein

I enjoy a good biography and I always thought of myself as Einstein admirer. And then I read this book and now I’m not sure. which is to say I now appreciate the difficulty of separating the person from their accomplishments.
When it comes to the latter, Einstein stands nearly peerless in a field of modern science. Not entirely alone and, granted, standing on the shoulders on giants, but still…the man’s a monument. There have only been 4 or 5 scientists in the entire timeline of science that have been able to do what he did…reinvent the paradigm, reinvent the way people think about the world. It’s basically Euclid, Galilei, Copernicus, Newton and Einstein. And since this short bio concentrates heavily on Einstein the physicist, it’s a pile of well deserved praises.
But then it veers to Einstein the man and that’s when it gets tricky. Because genius or not, he was also a man, a person of his time, shaped by the ideologies and events of his era. The book presents Einstein as a moral man in immoral times, moral, but complex and complicated. Compelled to flee and condemn his native land, he has nevertheless disparaged the intellectual prowess of his adopted country. Mind you, rightly so, America was never that bright and only got dumber since, but still…
A devoted Zionist, he has later all but abandoned the cause, certainly turned down a chance at Israel presidency quickly enough.
For all of Einstein’s accomplishments, he also never did complete the grand unification theory that would have tied up all his science neatly with a bow.
And in his personal life, the man was a nightmare. An absolute beast in his first marriage and an aspiring pervert in his second, alternating between paying for his son’s institutionalization and trying to sleep with his stepdaughters, this was a prime example of a man so ruled by his mind that it has all but disabled his emotional box of tricks. Or maybe it was a result of too many people over too many years telling him he was a gift to science which he took to mean also a gift to the world in general. The man certainly had the oversized ego a genius might.
Reminded me of Picasso, another brute of a man, all too enamored by his own accolades but then again Einstein was actually a genius and not a dramatically overrated artist.
So that’s the thing with biographies, that’s really the thing with getting to know anyone on a more than superficial level. All the ugly things come out into the light and we are left to reconcile that with all the good things. Balance is tricky.
Personally, I still admire Einstein and believe him to be a genius, a powerhouse of a mind and a revolutionary physicist. Maybe not a good person as such, but who are we to judge…
So that’s me reviewing Einstein. Tricky indeed. Reviewing this book about him is much easier. It’s one of a series of short bios of famous people, but it isn’t at all simplified or dumbed down due to the format. It’s an accessible and reasonably engaging nonlinear account of a life (heavy of science) that gives readers an excellent idea of Einstein as a scientist and a man. It’s also infinitely more serious than the goofy cover suggests, but Einstein would probably love that, After all, he loved his famous tongue sticking out image. Much food for thought here. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley.