Einstein: His Life and Universe

New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007. Book Club Edition. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. xxii, 675, [7] pages. Main Characters. Illustrations. Sources. Notes. Index. DJ has slight wear and soiling. Walter Isaacson (born May 20, 1952) is an American writer and journalist. He is the University Professor of History at Tulane University. He has been the President and CEO of the Aspen Institute, a nonpartisan educational and policy studies organization based in Washington, D.C., chairman and CEO of CNN and Managing Editor of Time. He has written biographies of Leonardo da Vinci, Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, and Henry Kissinger. Isaacson is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and was awarded its 2013 Benjamin Franklin Medal. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. In 2014, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected Isaacson for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities. Derived from a Kirkus review: A comprehensive and marvelously readable life of the eminent scientist-and more, the eminent counter-culturalist, rebel, humanist and philanderer. Brave enough to tread on such highly specialized ground, and working with newly available archival materials, Isaacson lucidly explains the finer points of Einstein's theories. One, the general theory of relativity, had its birth, Isaacson writes, while Einstein was struggling to write an article on his special theory of relativity; sitting in his office in Bern, where he worked as a patent-examiner--underlying it is some formidable work in physics and mathematics that took Einstein many subsequent years to express, and Isaacson acquits himself very well in taking readers along some strenuous paths of reasoning. Along with the science, An exemplary biography, at once sympathetic and unsparing. Readers will admire Einstein's greatness as a thinker, but they will now know that he, like all other idols, had feet of clay.