Picking best Einstein book is a no-brainer

First appears one inviting-but-thick biography of Albert Einstein, then another, albeit thinner. The first book shoots to the top of several best-seller lists but the largely unnoticed second book is much better.

Walter Isaacson, formerly an American CNN and Time executive, wrote "Einstein: His Life and Universe," and Jurgen Neffe, a German scientist and journalist, wrote "Einstein: A Biography."

In fact, Neffe's work was published in 2005 in Germany, thus embracing the centennial year of Einstein's major discovery, the theory of relativity. His book was on the German best-seller list for a year.

The next year, 2006, saw many more of Einstein's most important papers and letters released to scholars, so Neffe utilized those for the updated book that has recently hit bookshelves in the United States.

Isaacson also used them for his work.

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Neffe wrote a cover story for the German magazine Der Spiegel in 1999, when his editors wanted one story on "the evil" of the 20th century, Adolf Hitler, and another on "the brain," Einstein.

At the time, Neffe read every Einstein biography, and he says he found himself disappointed.

"Honestly, I didn't like any of them," Neffe said by phone from his home in Berlin. "I'm a biochemist and I've studied physics, and if I cannot really understand what is going on, then it's a bad sign. So I thought I'd like to write the Einstein biography I'd like to read myself." (Neffe, who wrote for Der Spiegel for 10 years, has taken a new position running the Max Blanck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.)

He said he discovered some things about Einstein that he hadn't known: "His inappropriate behavior toward his sons surprised me, and he was not entirely innocent toward what happened to his younger son, Eduard. (For many years Eduard was institutionalized as mentally deficient.)

"Scientifically, I was surprised that Einstein didn't reach his goal to generalize special relativity. One more surprise — how he treated both religion and his Jewish friends."

Neffe chose a thematic approach so he could give the reader a chance "to follow the whole story, like an article for a magazine. I wanted to concentrate on one subject rather than doing it chronologically."