By Manuel GarcÃa Iglesias & Marwan Kahil, translated by Peter Russella (NBM)
ISBN: 978-1-6811-2202-1 (HB)
Some people are too just too big for one biography. They affect the world in so many ways, and are so multi-faceted, that you simply can’t grasp the enormity of their existence in one go. Such a person was Albert Einstein who was born in Ulm, Germany on March 14th 1879 and who died on April 18th 1955 at Princeton University in the USA.
Between those dates he revolutionised the world, changed the accepted belief on universal reality, and grew into a saddened man whose great message went misunderstood and largely unheeded…
This absorbing luxurious monochrome hardcover (also available in digital formats) – whilst acknowledging the key intellectual breakthroughs – concentrates on the lesser known thoughts and attitudes of the most important being in human history. Over the troubled years of his childhood and formal education, his self-exile to Switzerland, clerical toil and part-time re-evaluation of the world’s workings, we see his development whilst meeting men like Max Talmud, Michele Besso and Marcel Grossman: friends and mentors whose relationships shaped Albert, his processes of cogitation and deduction and especially how he viewed the morality of the beings who inhabited his reconfigured universe…
Darting up and down his chronological timeline during the most globally-dangerous age of scientific enquiry, writer Marwan Kahil and artist Manuel GarcÃa Iglesias – quoting heavily from Einstein’s many interviews, speeches and correspondence via a parade of social meetings, lectures and conversations – reveal how a most uncommon intellect deconstructed the secrets of creation. They also depict the physicist’s eternal and contiguous struggle against the worst aspect of human behaviour: war and unthinking aggression and how his discoveries were twisted to serve them…
Gradual and understated in tone, this investigation is compelling in its examination of the world’s first celebrity scientist’s devotion to and advocacy of pacifism; leaving a disturbing echo of the disappointment he must have felt that his world-changing discoveries were being entrusted to agencies and attitudes who only wanted to use them for wicked purposes…
Some of that bleak tone is thankfully mitigated by the closing Epilogue, set at the CERN project in 2015, where knowledge, wisdom and the traditional continuity of scientific progress are seen to triumph over those darker drives, even in these modern days of imminent catastrophe and pointless self-destruction…
Augmented by incisive timeline Key Dates in the Life of Albert Einstein, a fulsome list of further reading in Biography and Sources and a copious illustrated collection of quotes ‘To Reflect On…’, this is a visual delight celebrating a unique mind and personality, and one you should see as soon as you can.
© 2017 Blue Lotus Prod. © 2019 NBM for the English translation.
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