Albert Einstein Book Review

Albert Einstein remains one of the 20th Century's most enigmatic yet popular figures. His high-minded concepts are more than most adults can handle, yet his popularity seems to rise with each passing year. His continuing importance to the world of physics is staggering given the recent advancements in the world of quantum physics. Yet Einstein the man is a much a different person than Einstein the scientist.
It is Einstein the man that we see here, in this wonderful book by Maree Ferguson Delano. Delano, who also wrote The Photogbiography of Thomas Alva Edison, returns to the photobiography format here as well, and it's a good thing because Einstein is difficult enough to digest as it is. Photo after photo shows Einstein as a definitely human scientist, one who cared deeply for his family and who wanted desperately to have a "real" job. Einstein lived in Germany during the rise of the Nazis. The threat to his safety is very real, and it is partly because of the horrors that he sees growing up that he helps the Allies on the road to building the atomic bomb. He once wrote" Organized power can be opposed only by organized power. Much as I regreat this, there is no other way."
The author does an excellent job of capturing the essence of the scientist and his momentous discoveries. (But the reader won't be able to get a complete picture of Einstein without a little further reading on his achievements. Delano tries mightily to distill the brilliance of Einstein into younger-reader-friendly terms, but it is a daunting task that escapes even the most brilliant of writers.)
His genius cannot be denied, however, and the author does a good job of displaying it for all to see. Einstein's theories of relativity and spacetime are amazing, especially considering that he was a terrible student, one whom one of his teachers predicted "would never amount to anything." That he conceived these monumental ideas with nothing more than pencil and paper and his own imagination is