Newspaper Article

AN AMBITIOUS PORTRAIT OF THE YOUTHFUL ALBERT EINSTEIN

Jeff Lyon Jeff Lyon is the Tribune's deputy Tempo editor, the co

2001

Overview

When [Michele Zackheim]'s book appeared, [Dennis Overbye] had already been at work on his biography of [ALBERT EINSTEIN] for six years. Overbye is deputy science editor at The New York Times and author of the widely admired 1991 book \"Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos,\" a lyrical paean to the scientists working to unlock such cosmological mysteries as the Big Bang, black holes and dark matter. He writes that he first became intrigued with chronicling Einstein's life at a scientific conference in New Orleans in 1990 where issues of Einstein scholarship arose. At the time, Albert's private correspondence with [Mileva Maric] had recently been made public, shedding new light on their relationship and the man behind the myth. Overbye recognized that release of the letters - - and the new availability of hundreds of other documents relating to Einstein's personal and professional sides -- represented an opportunity to explore fresh avenues of research. But along with that, he was attracted by the giant canvas he had to work with. Forty- five years after Einstein's death in 1955, writes Overbye, \"he remains the scientist most likely to make front-page newspaper headlines, as modern science confirms yet another of his bizarre- sounding hypotheses, published long ago. . . . Even Einstein's brain, preserved for four decades, made news in the summer of 1999 when neuroscientists at McMaster University in Ontario announced that his parietal lobe, a region associated with math and spatial relationships, was 15 percent larger than a normal person's.\"

• Publisher: Tribune Publishing Company, LLC
• Subject: Biographies / Books-titles / Einstein in Love: A Scientific Romance / Nonfiction / Overbye, Dennis