Ebook: A tale of two continents

The author of a highly acclaimed biorgaphy of Einstein, Subtle is the Lord, Pais writes engagingly for a general audience. He movingly descibes his period of hiding in Nazi-occupied Holland (he ended the war in a Gestapo prison) before taking stock of his life in America, particularly in the newly organized Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, then directed by the brilliant and controversial physicist Robert Oppenheimer. Pais new and worked with many of the greats of twentieth-century physics, and he relates many fascinating stories about Oppenheimer, Einstein, Bohr, Sakharov, Dirac, Heisenberg, and von Neumann, as well as about non-scientists like Chaim Weizmann, George Kennan, Erwin Panofsky, and Pablo Casals. His enthusiasm about science and life in general pervades a book that is both a memoir and a history of science.