Includes index.

"Peter A. Bucky enjoyed an advantage possessed by few others beside Albert Einstein himself when he set out to give us the rare insight into the great scientist's private life, opinions, and foibles that are now folded into this most unusual volume. And rarely has anyone succeeded in capturing the personality and intimate thoughts of the renowned but very human physicist the way the author has here. Indeed, this work is a lifetime's accumulation. Bucky, the son of one of Einstein's oldest and closest friends, traveled tens of thousands of miles around the United States with this most celebrated refugee from Nazi Germany. The Bucky and Einstein families visited often and vacationed together, and in the end, when only eleven persons were allowed to attend Albert Einstein's funeral, four were Buckys. It was during one of those vacations the families spent together that Einstein wrote the fateful letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt that led to the Manhattan Project, the making of the atomic bomb and the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. During all that time Peter Bucky was Einstein's frequent driver and companion, initiating extensive dialogues, keeping copious notes, and storing up priceless memories. And now, drawing on those notes and memories, Bucky gives us this intimate picture of the man - scientist and musician, thinker and poet, theorist and humorist - and this record of conversations that reveal the widely ranging insights and interests of his fertile mind. Here in pictures drawn from the author's notes and in thoughts expressed by Einstein himself we see the scientist in anguish over the dropping of the bombs and over the horrors strewn below the mushroom clouds. But we also hear his laughter ringing through the Bucky household, often upon finding an error of his own making. His was "such a hearty, open, childlike laugh," the author recalls, "that I really felt he was happy about discovering the error." Here is the sailor who could not swim, yet piloted his catboat in waters of Switzerland, Germany, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island while scorning the protection of life preservers, who laughed at capsizing even while clinging for his life to a semisubmerged hull, and who defied lightning to find his little mast in a storm-tossed lake. Here is Einstein recalling his youth as a student so single-minded that a professor once tried to steer him away from physics, and here is Einstein the professor, ahead of his time, scorning old systems of learning by rote and deploring examinations for their "undue force and pressure" on students. Here also is the poet who delighted his friends with notes couched in humorous verses, the violinist who held his own in the informal company of musical stars. Here is the Jew who revered his people but who held little reverence for formal religion, telling Bucky on one occasion, "My religion is really the universe." And, finally, here is the genius modestly making light of his own fame, protesting, as he did in one exchange with the author, "I am not more gifted than anybody else: I am just more curious." --,Dust Jacket.

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