| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Einstein: His Life and Universe. By Walter Isaacson. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007. xxii, 675 pp. $32.00, ISBN 978-0-7432-6473-0.)

The most original feature of Walter Isaacson's blockbuster new biography of the physicist Albert Einstein is his arrangement of chapters. That is not trivial. Einstein is treated biographically more often than perhaps any other scientific figure. Each of those Einstein tomes confronts the same set of problems: how to explain the physics; how to weave the complexities of a life lived across two continents in with that science; and how to explain the contrast between the radical young Einstein, willing to throw out many classical assumptions (such as the luminiferous ether or Euclidean spacetime), with his older self, who rejected the radical acausality behind the new quantum mechanics? Isaacson traipses across that territory with a light touch, eschewing strict chronology for thematically oriented chapters that overlap temporally, thus providing a fractured vision that is simultaneously quite coherent.

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