Cover Image: Einstein on the Run

Einstein on the Run

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Couldn't read as the format wouldn't work on any of my devices. Why can't publishers just put out kindle friendly versions?

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A fascinating insight into a man whose name I knew so well, but knew so little about. We have all seen the familiar photograph of the chap with the wild hair - almost a caricature - yet few of us have a clue about what he was like.

I'll hold my hands up here and admit that when it comes to science I am a complete dunce, but I was still able to enjoy this book despite struggling with the sections dealing with theoretical matters and quantum physics. Andrew Robinson provides sufficient context of the scientific, political and social movements of the times to allow readers to create a picture of Einstein the man, not just the scientist. I had no concept of the nationalistic and religious pressures on Einstein as a result of his rising profile, the petty jealousies of other scientists and Einstein's international travels.

All in all, not an easy book to read if you struggle with scientific concepts, but nevertheless worth persevering with if you want to understand more about one of the most significant figures in modern history.

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In this interesting and very readable biography of Einstein, the author focuses on the time the scientist spent in England after his flight from Nazi Germany and the effect this may have had on his work. Einstein certainly found a safe haven here, but ultimately left Britain for the US and never returned to Europe. I found the personal aspects of Einstein's life really interesting but the author's valiant attempts to explicate the science defeated me. It appears that even when put in apparently simple terms physics will always escape me. Nevertheless, I did enjoy the book and appreciated finding out more about this iconic scientist.

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I quite enjoyed Einstein On The Run, but it wasn’t really what I expected. It does shed interesting light on a little-known aspect of Einstein’s escape from the Nazis, but this forms a relatively minor part of the book, which makes the subtitle a little misleading.

The story of Einstein’s stay in Britain and the analysis of why he chose to go to the USA are very good aspect of the book. I have read quite a lot about Einstein but I didn’t know anything about any of this. Andrew Robinson has done a great deal of research and presents it well, so these parts of the book were very rewarding. However, there is an awful lot of other material in the book, a good deal of which is much more familiar. The book opens with a fairly lengthy outline of Einstein’s early life and work, for example, which is quite well done, but not really what I wanted to read the book for. The same can be said of quite a lot of the rest of the book which, while readable enough, didn’t add much to what I’d already read about several times before in other biographies and analyses of Einstein’s work. (Abaham Pais’s biography, Subtle Is The Lord sprang to mind rather often.)

I think a recommendation depends on what you’re looking for. If you want a decent, brief account of Einstein’s life and beliefs with an emphasis on hie time in Britain and how it affected him, this should do you well. For a book devoted to that time and its consequences, I found this just slightly disappointing.

(My thanks to Yale University Press for an ARC via NetGalley.)

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The layman in me wanted this to be – not for any patriotic reasons, mind, just out of curiosity – a look at how Britain got to inspire, inflect on and give harbour to Einstein. All of that is here, but this is much more of a general biography. I know it's what he was most known for, but here we get much more of the theories than I wanted from this, even when it's not the man's beloved English inspirations that helped him out but instead the initial Mach, Hertz, Planck et al. This fully tries to show Einstein's workings – always a bit tricky, for we are told the man got his first major papers out with zero regard for providing a bibliography of prior research – as they didn't need anybody else's prior research. He later became very woolly, too, about how he managed to do the work he had done.

En route too to a full examination of Einstein's love or otherwise of Britishness and his time here, we also get more than I would have assumed about his interactions with the Zionists building their own nation in between the World Wars. Don't get me wrong, this is all tied into the story – his pro-Zionist fundraising led to antagonism being multiplied in Germany, which of course sent him into Britannia's arms, even if only for a month or so here and there, but I felt this a little too completist and forensically academic in contrast to the book I thought I was getting. Still, before this can be claimed to be more about me than the book, it is still very readable – no wodges of notes interrupting the flow, for everything is in the core text – and succinctly full of great detail, such as the days when a full technical paper was displayed for the passing public in Selfridges' store windows, or how 1939 saw Princeton freshers vote Hitler above Einstein (by some considerable margin) as 'greatest living person', while Einstein was working as their very neighbour.

In all, I never objected to the contents here, but coming to this as Mister Average Browser I felt it a little too heavily on the academic side. A true classic non-fiction will make me think any spurious, trivial or serious minutia of history is worth a whole book on – these pages kind of proved that there was not a full, populist title to be had on this subject. Still, three and a half stars, with more deemed the verdict from the point of view of someone more able to engage so intimately with science history.

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