Einstein: Visionary Scientist Book

Albert Einstein expanded the way we understand our universe and helped create a framework for modern physics with his groundbreaking theory of relativity. In this detailed and well-balanced biography, illustrated with exceptional archival photographs, John B. Severance recounts Einstein's life from his privileged childhood and disappointing early career to his later recognition as one of the most respected and beloved scientists of this century. The author identifies Einstein's complex theories and makes clear why his ideas are still the basis of work by today's top physicists. He also reveals many of Einstein's inner complexities and eccentricities, exploring the personal and public controversies that followed him throughout his life. What emerges is a picture of a brilliant, compassionate, yet imperfect man whose remarkable theories gave the world an enormous push into the future.

Horn Book

(Intermediate, Young Adult)
Any writer faces a formidable task in trying to contain the genius Einstein within the pages of a book, especially a short biography; whatever the author writes serves only to accent the magnitude of the man and his ideas. To the credit of Severance (a biographer who has already tackled two legendary twentieth-century figures with Gandhi [rev. 5/97] and Winston Churchill [rev. 7/96]), he opens with an attempt to place Einstein in history, a history that begins properly with Galileo and one that, Severance avows, will continue to move with yet more astonishing velocity into the new millennium. Engravings of Galileo and Newton set the stage for the superb archival photographs that reveal the private Einstein in his youth and the extraordinary ruffled image of the older Einstein who was often baffled by his popularity as a "middle-aged scientist whose theories [the public] did not understand." Throughout, Severance affords us glimpses not only of the more private Einstein but also of the other public figures (Gandhi, Marie Curie, President Warren Harding, Freud, Hitler) who shaped his life and destiny. The narrative is expanded visually by photographs revealing not only the places he inhabited (Salzburg and Prague, Bern and Zurich) but also the scenes that defined his vision (the Princeton campus, a shell-torn village in WWI France, the dropping of the bomb on Nagasaki). Personal details both humanize and complicate the man who attempted "to boil an egg in a pot of soup to save time and minimize kitchen mess," who interrupted a lecture to excuse those "who had come just to see the great man," who altered his longstanding pacifism to speak out publicly in support of military opposition to the Nazis. Aware of his audience, Severance interrupts his own narrative several times to explain lucidly and succinctly certain of Einstein's theories. Severance appends an excellent, coherent timetable of events and a full bibliography to his text. That he chooses to juxtapose Einstein's orderly chronology with the complex blackboard workings of Einstein's theory of relativity speaks powerfully to the dualities that characterized the man and his life. Severance wisely gives the final words to Einstein: "I live and I feel puzzled, and all the time I try to understand." s.p.b.