Ordinary Genius: The Story of Albert Einstein

Stephanie Sammartino McPherson
Carolrhoda Books, Inc. (1997)
ISBN 9781575050676
Reviewed by Spencer Zaborowski (age 12) for Reader Views (12/07)

“Ordinary Genius: The Story of Albert Einstein” is a biography, which is a story of a person's life, of the famous German scientist.  He was born on March 14, 1879, in Ulm, Germany.  He had one sister.  He was thought of by his parents as being slow and not very bright, because he had an unusually large head when he was born and he did not speak much until he was nine-years-old.  He was not a good student and was teased a lot by his teachers and other students, because he was different and questioned them a lot. He finally moved to Switzerland and worked for awhile before being accepted into college.  He was curious about the world around him, especially science.  He was a professor at universities in Switzerland and Germany, and he worked very long hours finishing scientific papers.  He wrote the famous Theory of Relativity in 1916.  Albert Einstein came to the United States in 1933 and lived in New Jersey because he was worried about how Jews were treated in Germany.  He married twice - his second wife was his cousin.  He died in 1955.

At first, I thought this book would be boring and full of science and facts, like some other biographies I have read.  But after the first few pages, it was hard to put down!  The reading was interesting, and the black and white pictures throughout the book helped to make the story easy to follow.  There were not a lot of technical words that would be hard to understand.  The book did not go into detail about the scientific things that he wrote about.   Instead, the book was more about his personal life and his odd personality.  I learned a lot of things about him that I had not known.  For example, Einstein never learned to drive a car because he was confused by mechanical things.  That was very funny to me.

I would recommend “Ordinary Genius: The Story of Albert Einstein” to middle school-aged kids.  I don't normally like to read nonfiction books--only when I have to for school--but this one kept my interest because it told a lot of personal stories and facts about Einstein that made him seem ordinary, like the title says.

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