"With graceful lucidity, Gimbel illuminates the intensely personal challenges facing the great physicist."-Booklist, Starred Review Booklist "The time is now ripe for a short book, summarizing briefly the well-known facts about Einstein's rocky road as a husband and father and scientist, and emphasizing his lasting importance as a politician and a philosopher. This book is accurate and well balanced. It presents Einstein's Jewish heritage as he saw it himself, not as the core of his being, but as a historical accident bringing inescapable responsibilities. The reasons for reading this book are also simple... There are a few scientists whose lives and thoughts are of perennial interest, because they permanently changed our way of thinking. To the few belong Galileo and Newton and Darwin, and now Einstein... New books will need to be written and read, because these people had enduring ideas that throw light on new problems as the centuries go by."-Freeman Dyson, New York Review of Books -- Freeman Dyson New York Review of Books 'What makes Gimbel's book different is its brevity and its emphasis on these cultural and political aspects of the man. Gimbel is a philosopher... yet at the same time the explanations of the science are exemplary - swift and clear.'-Bryan Appleyard, Sunday Times. -- Bryan Appleyard Sunday Times

Steven Gimbel is the Edwin T. and Cynthia Shearer Johnson Chair for Distinguished Teaching in the Humanities as well as chair of the philosophy department at Gettysburg College. He lives in Mount Airy, MD.