Albert Einstein Speaking

I was seduced into reading “Albert Einstein Speaking” by the publisher’s blurb description: “Princeton New Jersey. 14th March 1954. “Albert Einstein speaking.” “What?” says the girl on the telephone”? “I am sorry, she says, I have the wrong number.” From a wrong number to a friendship that would impact both their lives, the novel begins with a meeting of two very different minds – the world most respected scientist and a schoolgirl from New Jersey……” So much for the blurb which did the trick winning me as a reader and I don't regret these reading hours at all.

Although it is true that Mimi Beaufort, the girl on the phone and Isabella, her sister, played a very important role

in making Albert Einstein’s life a much happier one during his last years, I was a bit miffed feeling lead on that the majority of the book would be about this relationship but in fact 25 % of the book is only about their relationship.

The rest, 75 % of the book, is a fictionalized biography staying close to facts about Albert Einstein’s incredible life. Putting my being miffed aside, I started to really enjoy this very informative, charming, well composed and engrossing read about Albert Einstein. I did not know very much about his life apart from the more well-known facts. Reading “Albert Einstein speaking” gave me a great inside into this Nobel Prize Winner’s biography, a pacifist who as a Jew supported the founding of the state of Israel hating the Nazi’s, a man who loved music and the ladies with a tumultuous private life during equally tumultuous political times who is still considered the most influential physicist of the 20th century by many.

The most charming part of the book are of course the chapters about his tender, fatherly relationship with Mimi and Isabella in US exile where he taught at Princeton leaving the political mess of Europe behind him.

The description doesn’t quite catch what this books is about - it is basically a novelised biography of Albert Einstein’s life, the friendship with Mimi Beaufort at the end of his life taking up very little of the story.
The style is strange - part factual, part literary, written in present tense, with some photographs thrown in, but for some reason the whole mix worked quite well and I kept reading.
I don’t think I would have picked it up had I known what it was, as I don’t ususally read biographies, but Einstein lived an interesting life, and I actually ended up enjoying it and finding it quite moving.