Einstein in Love: (A Scientific Romance)

As Dennis Overbye explains in the introduction to Eiinstein in Love, his first book since the National Book Critics Circle and Los Angeles Times Book Award nominee Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, his primary goal is to separate the man "Albert" from the myth "Einstein", to restore humanity and individuality and shaded nuance to a man who has become the most monolithic figure in the scientific pantheon.

Einstein in Love is the first of the many biographies of the great scientist to focus exclusively on his life during the first two decades of the wentieth century, the period of the greatest intellectual catclysm in modern history. The "love" in the title of this book has a double meaning, referring not only to young Albert's exhilarating infatuation with his discoveries of the vistas of a new physics in general relativity, but also his ecstatic, cerebral, and tormented relationship with his first wife, Mileva Maric. While Mileva has always been a controversial figure in the Einstein legend - some commentators have gone as awarding her equal credit for the discovery of relativity - no book has treated her as fully and as sympathetically as Overbye's. The Einsteins were the first modern couple, and for the nearly twenty years of their marriage they were as often colleagues as they were emotional adversaries.

Drawing upon hundreds of Einstein's published and unpublished letters, Overbey presents the greatest of scientific romances in a vivid new light, told with novelistic detail and narrative drive. The story of young Einstein is the story of the young man who actually did the revolutionary work that made the old man famous, a young man whose demanor is more that of James Dean than AlbertSchweitzer, a teenager in love, a draftdodger, bohemian, poet, violinist, and whirlwind who left personal, political, and professional chaos in his wake.

Einstein in Love bring that man to life as never before, as well as a large cast of the greatest scientific minds in Europe, as told by one of today's most respected science journalists.