The Maniac

The Maniac by Benjamín Labatut (2023) 354 pages

This is a fictional memoir of renowned Hungarian-American mathematician John von Neumann. Overall, this is a dark read – Neumann scorched everyone he interacted with and was as complicated as his arcane areas of study. Labatut plays it loose with a cast of historical characters who interacted with the brilliant polymath. Borrowing heavily from secondary sources and his imagination the author weaves a tale of ambition, hubris and brilliance. I enjoyed the literary device of letting contemporaries tell the saga. Labatut has an uncanny ability to assume the voice of the narrator, including context. My favorite example is physicist Richard Feynman describing his limited interactions with Neumann. The chapter reads like a mini-biography of Feynman and describes the frenetic atmosphere of the WWII Manhattan project -- constructing the first atomic bombs (did I mention dark?).  The tragic nature of Neumann’s legacy – he died at age 53 – is strewn across the pages like radiation from a nuclear explosion.

Einstein's Cosmos

Einstein's Cosmos: How Einstein's Vision Transformed Our Understanding of Space and Time by Michio Kaku  251 pp.

This book is a brief history of Albert Einstein's career and his achievements in the world of physics and the impact his theories on scientific discovery in the year's since. Many people believe that Einstein wasted the last twenty-five years of his life in the search for a Grand Unification Theory and that he was against the theories of quantum physics. Kaku uses the discovery of some later Einstein papers to show how his work after the Theory of Relativity and the Special Theory of Relativity was geared to finding a way to connect those theories to quantum theory. Kaku also explains how without the work of Einstein, none of the current work of CERN and other scientists would even be possible. Kaku, also a theoretical physicist, is able to explain the theories and physics research in a way that is understandable to the lay person.  

Einstein: His Space and Times / Steven Gimbel 191 pp.

One doesn't have to be a genius to make Einstein's story interesting, but a writer has to be skilled to distill its many events, both scientific and personal, into 191 pp. while conveying the sense of a flesh and blood human being.  It's my near-constant complaint about biographies; most give you a lot of information about the person without making you feel that you know the person.  Gimbel scores high on my biographo-meter, using judicious details about Einstein's appearance, habits, and opinions to color events many of us are familiar with on the page in black and white: the world-changing papers produced by the Zurich patent clerk, the science wars over relativity and quantum mechanics, and Einstein's ambivalence over Judaism, Zionism, and pacifism.  I can't say whether Gimbel's explanations of Einstein's theories are entirely apt, but they are certainly as clearly written as others I've read for the non-scientist, and admirably concise.