The Travel Diaries of Albert Einstein: The Far East, Palestine, and Spain, 1922-1923

Description

Albert Einstein's travel diary to the Far East and Middle East In the fall of 1922, Albert Einstein, along with his then-wife, Elsa Einstein, embarked on a five-and-a-half-month voyage to the Far East and Middle East, regions that the renowned physicist had never visited before. Einstein's lengthy itinerary consisted of stops in Hong Kong and Si

Ze'ev Rosenkranz is senior editor and assistant director of the Einstein Papers Project at the California Institute of Technology. Previously, he was the Bern Dibner Curator of the Albert Einstein Archives at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He is the author of Einstein Before Israel (Princeton) and The Einstein Scrapbook.

"The Travel Diaries is a substantially revised version of the 2012 translation that comes with an illuminating introduction and astonishingly comprehensive end-notes by Ze'ev Rosenkranz. . . . Anyone interested in Einstein's complex, sometimes self-contradictory, character will be enjoyably provoked by reading his piquant Travel Diaries."---Andrew Robinson, Science "In this travel journal, clearly written for his eyes only, we see [Einstein] at his most human, capable of making boorish, unthinking and even racist remarks. Indeed, it shows that Einstein was first and foremost a brilliant scientist and that though he undoubtedly had an unequalled insight into the laws of physics, his understanding of human nature and of other cultures was far from profound. It seems that even a genius is, in the end, only human."---P. D. Smith, Times Literary Supplement "An eye-opening collection of travel diaries from the legendary scientist and thinker." * Kirkus Reviews * "The handwritten diary shows Einstein in an unfamiliar light, as a tourist-in the real, earthbound sense, not (as in his famous thought experiment) riding a light beam through space-time. Never intended for publication, it records his thoughts and impressions as they occurred, unmediated and unfiltered by considerations of how they would affect his image."---Jerry Adler, Smithsonian "Few know of Einstein's writings on travel. . . . That shortcoming may now be remedied with the publication of a fascinating narrative of his first main travels outside of Europe."---Michael Curtis, New English Review "[Rosenkranz] has prepared a luxuriously enriched edition with a thoughtful introduction and extensive notes for the wider audience."---David Bodanis, Literary Review