Einstein: His Life and Universe Paperback – 11 May 2017

Well researched and excellently written, it will give you a much better understanding of one of the greatest scientists and thinkers of all time.But I wish the author or the published would have put Einstein's real photo instead of an actor on the cover.

This is an excellent, excellent book.A comprehensive, start to finish biography of the man's life, with extremely complicated, abstract mathematics and physics explained in a simplified manner, in a way only someone who intrinsically understands the subject can do.Despite the subject matter, and by that I I close the First and Second World Wars, anti-Semitism and, intimately, the Holocaust, and also the physics and maths, it was simply a joy to read and never once felt heavy or dull.If there is a better biography of Einstein out there, I won't just eat my hat, I'll grow my hair and moustache and impersonate the man for the rest of my days!

This book is the most detailed account of einstien i have read, it goes through all the difficulties in his career and explains why he is they way he is - a man with the big picture. it also brought to light his strange ability to perform though experiments and postulate a new hypothesis with very little evidence. I feel this is a good biography quite thick, lost of detail. My only concern was that too much emphasis was on his first marraige which was happy then unhappy but i suppose this was the nature of his life to see his emotional state. A good read overall

This proved to be an interesting and very complete biography of Einstein, with sources listed for all key facts. Perhaps it was a trifle too long in parts, resulting in me skimming some sections, but it provides a remarkable insight into the life and the times of this great physicist. Whilst I had prior knowledge of Einstein's scientific work, I had not appreciated other aspects of his life, including his troubled relationships with his first wife and his children from that marriage, nor had I understood the extent of the anti-semitism to which he had been subjected, nor his celebrity status, whereby the press hung on to his every word. As well as detailing Einstein's life, Walter Isaacson also does a sound job of explaining, in simplified terms, the background to much of Einstein's scientific endeavours, including quantum physics, relativity, and his unsuccessful search for a unified field theory to unite gravitation with electromagnetism. I learned a lot about Einstein from this book and Isaacson brought him alive in terms of his personality.

Sorry, there's no other way to put it. What Isaacson achieved was not only a great historical chronicle of the greatest thinker of the 20th century, but he also manages to capture, as closely as reasonably possible, the thought process that Einstein engaged in. the attentive reader will also see that it was this thought process that also contributed to his stubbornness about the Quantum sphere. this was one of those biographies that I read piecemeal. There are so many wonderful anecdotes enmeshed into this narrative that after reading them, I wanted to let them swim around my consciousness for a day. The backdrop of the growth of 20th century nationalism plays heavily in this narrative and one can't help but be amazed that such great minds emerged from such a dogmatic time. One looks at the times we live in today and cannot help but be in awe that the quest for scientific truth was so resolute.I hope were made of the same strong stuff.

The whole story is told in a manner which is understandable to the average interested person without being oversimplified for them. Einstein’s interactions with other people from US Presidents down to icecream salesgirls provide a glimpse of the complex but likeable human behind the genius.

This is a comprehensive and accurate, well researched and referenced book. I like it because it combines a reasonable 'in depth' and understandable description of Einstein's theories with a very good and fair representation of his private life and his personality, all within a referenced time frame. It has referenced primary source material which has only recently become available which makes it quite different from previous Einstein biographies.

Started off really well, but very soon became difficult to read. Might be the first book I don’t complete 😕