Rating: 3/5
Review:
A very basic biography
This little biography is OK as far as it goes – but that
isn't really very far, I'm afraid.
The book is very brief, so the information in it is
commendably concise and reasonably well presented. There are some nice photos and a few
illustrations to explain things like the photoelectric effect and Brownian
motion, although I'm not sure how much clearer they would make matters to a
non-scientific reader.
The prose is very flat and reads like a list of events
rather than a story or any sort of analysis; that's OK if you just want a sort
of longish encyclopaedia article, but not so good for the general reader. It seems plain in a few places that English
isn't the writer's first language. For
example, talking about Einstein's parents' opposition to his marriage, we read
that eventually "his father fell ill with death and consented." This kind of thing doesn't intrude too much,
but it's not great to read.
Don't look to this for any real explanation of Einstein's
physics. His big ideas in Relativity are
mentioned, of course, and they're given a bit of an outline, but there isn't
enough here for anyone new to the ideas to learn much about them.
Really what you get in this bite-sized book is a chronology
of the basic events in Einstein's life with little analysis or depth to the
science. It's an OK read but not a
fluent one, so it may do if you just need a bit of basic biographical
information. For anything more than that
you will need to try Abaham Pais's book or one of the other excellent
biographies already published.
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