Einstein: His Life and Universe

Isaacson wrote the biography after Einstein's personal papers were released in 2006, which gave access to correspondence previously restricted. The book covers the childhood and schooling in Germany and Switzerland, the patent office years in Bern, the 1905 papers, general relativity, the Nobel Prize, the emigration to Princeton, the letter to Roosevelt, and the unsuccessful decades pursuing a unified field theory.

The scientific explanation is at a general reader's level and Isaacson had physicists review it. He explains the 1905 papers on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion and special relativity, and works through the ten-year path to general relativity including the equivalence principle and the 1919 eclipse observations that confirmed the light-bending prediction.

The recurring argument is that Einstein's results came from questioning assumptions others treated as given, particularly the absolute nature of simultaneity, and that his later resistance to quantum mechanics came from the same disposition applied to a case where he was wrong. Isaacson connects the scientific rebellion to the personal one, showing a man who rejected authority in schooling, in politics and in physics with equal consistency.

The personal material is unsparing. Einstein's first marriage to Mileva Maric, the daughter born before the marriage whose fate is unknown, the written conditions he imposed on Mileva, his distance from his sons and the second marriage to his cousin Elsa are all documented from the letters. The physics will be too simple for readers with technical backgrounds and too dense for those without. Isaacson's framing of Einstein as a model of creative nonconformity is repeated more often than it is demonstrated. The last thirty years of Einstein's scientific work produced nothing, and the book handles that period honestly.

American biographer and professor of history at Tulane University; formerly editor of Time and chief executive of CNN and the Aspen Institute.

The biographies are built on long direct access - years of interviews with Jobs, then with Musk - and reconstruct how each subject decided, hired and treated the people around them. The Innovators does the same for computing, presenting it as a chain of collaborations rather than a sequence of lone inventions.

Tulane University, Amanpour & Company, Aspen Institute, CNN, Time