I found this reading to be an interesting piece. I enjoyed the view of Einstein the person, not just Einstein the super-godlike physicist. Most of what I’d known of Einstein is that he worked in a Swiss patent office when he came up with the whole idea of relativity. I’d never known of his family relationships, or his difficulties with formal education, or his period of disbelief in religion. I learned that Einstein disliked the attention he received, his celebrity status acquired as a result of his physics theories. Before Einstein had been to me a simple, flat character, but now I see him as a complex person who was more than just a scientist.
I found much of the book easy to read. The stories of his youth and his education and his search for a job were easy to read. The attempts to describe his theories, however, were not so easy to understand. I have heard other explanations that made more sense to me than these do (and the pictures did little more than the text explanations). The book did seem to supply superfluous information about other scientists at some times, but at others would deny the reader the details of Einstein’s theories and concepts which he put so much time into.
The author seemed definitely sympathetic to Einstein. The author believed that Einstein was a deep person, where every word that he spoke had a deep meaning that one had to discover, to examine thoroughly.
Even though I found the reading interesting, I don’t know that an introductory level history of science course requires studying a scientist’s biography.