You might think that a biography of Albert Einstein would be a tough read; full of discussions of Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, and Unified Field Theories that, for the average person at least, would be incomprehensible. In Einstein: His Life And Universe
From his early exposure to Pre-World War I Prussian militarism, which turned him into an ardent pacifist, to his escape from Germany during the Nazi rise to power, which caused him to abandon his anti-militarist ideas in the face of a rearming fascist state, to his role in the development of the Atomic Bomb, which turned him into a leading spokesman for a naive, if well-intentioned, call for world government in the face of a technology that could destroy mankind, the Einstein that emerges it at times fascinating and frustrating. Fascinating in the way in which he rebelled against the scientific orthodoxy of his day and revolutionized physics with the General Theory of Relativity only to later become one of the most ardent defenders of the status quo in the face of what he considered the chaos of quantum mechanics. Frustrating in the way that he sometimes treated those close to him — the kindly professor, it seems, was something of a playboy in his youth.
All in all, though, Isaacson does an excellent job of making understandable one of the most complex minds in human history.
