We see that javascript is disabled or not supported by your browser - javascript is needed for important actions on the site. Read more

What's New - Home - Login

Member $avings: $81,578,490.13 | Books Available: 794,083 | Members Online: 37

Swap Used Books - Buy New Books at Great Prices!

How To Swap Books Sign Up Search submenu

PBS Market (New Books)

Gift Buying Guide

Book Browser Advanced Search Books Posted Today Member Book Reviews Award Winning Books NYT Best Sellers Amazon Best Sellers Most Traveled Copies Club Wish List

Discussion Forums Book Lists

Club Lists My Book Lists My Watched Lists Create a List

Blog Donations

School Donation Program In Memory of... Military Donation Program Friends of PBS

Box-O-Books Maps The Eclectic Pen Fun Stuff

20 Questions Sudoku Bookmark Creator

Top 100

Requests Posts Swappers Referrers Reviewers

Pulse of PBS Spread The Word

Invite Friends Bookmarks Facebook Page Facebook App More Ways...

Photo Gallery Recipes Club Tag Cloud Member Testimonials

Help Center submenu

How To Swap Books Browse Help Docs Ask the Librarian PBS Member Icons Live Help

Kiosk

PBS Market (New Books) Go Shopping Buy Credits Buy PBS Money Upgrade Membership Gift Certificates Transfer Credits

Need Help?

Search - Einstein Lived Here: Essays for the Layman

Einstein Lived Here Essays for the Layman
Author: Abraham Pais

Abraham Pais's 'Subtle is the Lord...' is the definitive biography of Albert Einstein. Timothy Ferris, in The New York Times Book Review, called it "the biography of Einstein he himself would have liked best," adding that "it is a work against which future scientific biographies will be measured." As a respected physicist himself, Pais was the f... more »irst biographer to give Einstein's thinking its full due, and as a close friend and associate of Einstein, he could provide an intimate, first-hand account of the life of this great scientist. The result was a national bestseller. Indeed, it was one of The New York Times's Best Books of the Year, and the winner of the 1983 American Book Award for Science. Now, Pais turns his attention to the great physicist's life outside of science, with an informal, almost kalaidoscopic portrait of Einstein--his personal life and his public persona ("my mythical namesake who has made my life so burdensome"), his scientific contributions, and his thoughts on religion, philosophy, and politics, on Israel and Zionism, on the rise of Nazism and McCarthyism, and on much more. Pais offers a candid look at Einstein's troubled personal life--his two failed marriages, his first child Lieserl, who was born out of wedlock (and of whom all trace has vanished), his estranged son Hans Albert, also a scientist, who felt his father had abandoned the family, and his son Eduard, who gradually descended into madness. Of course, any book on Einstein must touch upon science, and Pais includes several illuminating chapters, one of which offers general readers an accessible explanation of relativity, and another traces the long road to Einstein's Nobel Prize (after being nominated almost every year from 1909 to 1920, he finally won in 1921--not for relativity, but for his work on the photoelectric effect). On the lighter side, Pais includes samples from Einstein's "curiosity file," in which he kept crank letters, marriage proposals, hate mail (one began "You are the prince of idiocy, the count of imbecility, the duke of cretinism, the baron of morons"), and the like. But the heart of the book is the final section, where Pais traces Einstein's life as seen through the media. Here we not only meet Einstein the living legend--receiving the keys to New York City from flamboyant Mayor Jimmy Walker, attending the Hollywood premier of City Lights with Charlie Chaplin--but also witness his extensive involvement in the issues of his day. Much of his commentary is amazingly prescient. In 1933, he said of Nazism: "I cannot understand the passive response of the whole civilized world to this modern barbarism. Does the world not see that Hitler is aiming for war?" "I can still see Einstein's smile before me," the great physicist Niels Bohr said several years after Einstein's death, "a very special smile...knowing, humane, and friendly." In Einstein Lived Here, this more than anything else is the Einstein we see--knowing, humane, friendly--a world figure on a par with the greats of his age who could still ask "Why is it that nobody understands me and everybody likes me."

ISBN-13: 9780198539940
ISBN-10: 0198539940
Publication Date: 5/12/1994
Pages: 298
Rating:

Currently 4/5 Stars.

4 stars, based on 1 rating

Publisher: Oxford Univ Pr (T)
Book Type: Hardcover
Members Wishing: 0
Reviews: Amazon | Write a Review

Genres:

Biographies & Memoirs >> General
Biographies & Memoirs >> Professionals & Academics >> Scientists
Biographies & Memoirs >> People, A-Z >> ( E ) >> Einstein, Albert
Science & Math >> Physics >> General

Back to the Top ↑

Search - Einstein Lived Here: Essays for the Layman

Loading...