Books

Einstein biography for $3

Posted on by Patrick

Einstein book coverWent 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.

Can’t blog. Writing.

Posted on by Patrick

I’ve decid­ed to enter a non-fic­tion con­test, and I have to have the sto­ry in the mail by Nov. 1st, so I’m kind of up against a dead­line. The theme of the con­test is “A Mem­o­rable Voy­age”; my entry, in about its sec­ond draft, is here. You’ll need a pass­word, too: it’s win­nipego­sis. Read it, if you’d like; let me know what you think. (It’s short, only about 1100 words.)

I fin­ished Last Light of the Sun last night. It was enjoy­able, well-researched, and some­thing that I don’t nor­mal­ly read. As a fan­ta­sy it was very low-key; as a his­tor­i­cal nov­el it was heav­i­ly fic­tion­al­ized; as an out-and-out sto­ry that hap­pened to be set 1,000 years ago, it was excel­lent. Gabriele, I seem to remem­ber that you were read­ing it. Do you have any com­ments on it? Did you fin­ish? Did you enjoy it?Later, y’all!