Einstein biography for $3

Went down to For­bid­den Flavours tonight to buy my sis­ter a birth­day gift (shhh, nobody tell her), and I nat­u­ral­ly went into the used book­store in the back. They had copies of Greg Bear’s Eon and Eter­ni­ty in there, but the book I end­ed up buy­ing was Ein­stein: the Life and Times. Looks fas­ci­nat­ing, but it’ll have to wait till I’m done the oth­er books in my stack.

From the back cover:

Here is the real Ein­stein: The boy grow­ing up in the Swiss Alps, the young man caught in an unhap­py first mar­riage, the pas­sion­ate paci­fist who ago­nized over his role in the mak­ing of The Bomb, the indif­fer­ent Zion­ist who was asked to head the Israeli state, the physi­cist who believed in God. Here, too, are the mod­ern giants who touched Ein­stein’s life: Franklin Roo­sevelt, Sig­mund Freud, Madame Curie, and Ben-Gurion.

I’ve long been fas­ci­nat­ed by Ein­stein, though I know rel­a­tive­ly lit­tle about him. I know that his Nobel prize was not for rel­a­tiv­i­ty but for his work on the pho­to­elec­tric effect; I know that he stub­born­ly refused to believe in the impli­ca­tions of quan­tum mechan­ics; and that’s about all. I’m look­ing for­ward to learn­ing more, more, more.