Books, Arts & Manners: The Ways of a Genius

Einstein—The Life and Times By Ronald W. Clark

World, 718 pp., $15 When a new book on Einstein appears the average reader will eagerly search for the confirmation of his favorite apocrypha, but this reviewer searched Clark’s new biography in vain for his own: that during Einstein’s residence in Princeton speed limits in the town were artificially lowered because his random wandering often did not distinguish between the street and the sidewalk. It seemed so appropriate that in the intensity of his meditation on the great symmetries of space and time he should instinctively reject anything that violated them so crudely as a direction. But, alas, Clark deals ruthlessly with the whole canon, and the anecdote hunter will have to search authority from some work less austerely disciplined. However, it is the discipline of his judgment no less than the massiveness of his research that makes this biography now the definitive one for a general audience.

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Wayne J. Holman Iii

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Einstein—The Life and Times By Ronald W. Clark

World, 718 pp., $15 When a new book on Einstein appears the average reader will eagerly search for the confirmation of his favorite apocrypha, but this reviewer searched Clark’s new biography in vain for his own: that during Einstein’s residence in Princeton speed limits in the town were artificially lowered because his random wandering often did not distinguish between the street and the sidewalk. It seemed so appropriate that in the intensity of his meditation on the great symmetries of space and time he should instinctively reject anything that violated them so crudely as a direction. But, alas, Clark deals ruthlessly with the whole canon, and the anecdote hunter will have to search authority from some work less austerely disciplined. However, it is the discipline of his judgment no less than the massiveness of his research that makes this biography now the definitive one for a general audience.