Not sure why I picked up this book, but I am certainly tickled to have now read it, cover to cover.  Herein we flow through the life and loves of Albert Einstein in parallel with his astounding discoveries as a physicist.  For genealogists, the book details Einstein's family, his wife's family and their children, an interesting family tree.  

 

We glean a sense of his family and their hard spoken wishes for their son while he beavers through a classical European education.  During which period he falls in love with his future wife, Mileva and fathers a daughter out of wedlock.  The daughter disappears into Mileva’s extended Serbian family, but the couple eventually marry, and two sons join the family that eventually fractures. 

 

Unbeknownst to me, there is a full-blown industry in Einstein memorabilia that has captured the hundreds and hundreds of letters between Alberta and his family as well as the scientific letters between Albert and his colleagues and critics.  

 

Overbye does a masterful job of following Albert’s thinking as he ponders his way through to the General Theory of Relativity.  Albert used a host of imagery to help explain his discoveries including the well-known traveler aboard a light beam and the man in a falling elevator who does not feel his own weight.  

 

You just must read the paragraph where Overbye describes an eclipse!  Absolutely wonderful!

 

Einstein was not a mathematician and relied upon Mileva in his early years and transitioned to greater mathematical minds as the years passed and his explorations expanded.  We garner a glimpse of the many dialogues (by letter) with the great scientific minds of the times.  Albert withstands WWI with increasing success and recognition but as a Jew he escapes the Nazi purges in 1933, moving to America.

 

Even if you are not a physicist, this book is a fun read, exploring the life and challenges of one of the greatest minds of all time as well as his amazing discoveries of our universe. 

 

Ron Gilmore

Last Updated: March 29, 2023