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Einstein: The Life and Times
Ronald W. Clark
For decades the standard one-volume life of Einstein, Ronald Clark's 1971 biography is less about the equations than about the man who wrote them. Clark spent three years on it, drawing on then-new material to trace Einstein from a boyhood in the Swiss Alps through an unhappy first marriage, the miracle year of 1905, worldwide fame, exile, and his uneasy role in the birth of the atomic age. The passionate pacifist who nonetheless signed the letter that spurred the Bomb, the reluctant Zionist offered the Israeli presidency, the physicist who spoke of God: all are here at length. Published by World Publishing, it remains a rich, humane portrait for readers who want the historical Einstein, not the T-shirt icon.
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The author
Ronald W. Clark (1916-1987) was a prolific British biographer whose subjects included Bertrand Russell, Sigmund Freud, J. B. S. Haldane, and the Huxley family. A meticulous researcher rather than a physicist, he specialized in placing scientific and intellectual figures in their full historical setting.
The book
First published in 1971 by the World Publishing Company, Einstein: The Life and Times runs to some 700 pages and was, for a generation, the definitive biography. Clark leans into Einstein's politics, pacifism, and public life as much as his physics, giving the science context rather than deriving it in detail.
How it has aged
It remains substantial and reliable on the outline of Einstein's life, but it has been overtaken in places. Later scholarship, especially the ongoing Einstein Papers Project and biographies by Abraham Pais (a physicist) and Walter Isaacson, drew on correspondence unavailable to Clark, sharpening the picture of Einstein's marriages and inner life. Clark's is the older, more literary standard.
For more context
Read alongside Pais's Subtle Is the Lord for the science and Isaacson's Einstein: His Life and Universe for the archival update.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Ronald W. Clark
- Publisher
- World Publishing Company
- Place of publication
- New York
- Year
- 1971
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Biography & Memoir
- Location
- Colorado