The Other Einstein: A Novel

Bought as a Christmas present As what do you buy a woman who has most things 👍

What a fascinating and thought-provoking read this was! That it was based on the real first marriage of Albert and Mileva Einstein was new for me and the author's note at the end of the book - about the science community's debate around Mileva's potentially significant yet un-named contribution to one of science's most defining theories, the theory of relativity - had me wondering how many other brilliant women's contributions were silenced. I'm looking forward to reading more from Marie Benedict. A highly recommended 4 stars.

I couldn't put it down!! Definately a must read, really interesting to see & understand a different side to Albert Einstein.

When I first read about this book, I was really fascinated. Just like everybody else I’ve heard a lot about Albert Einstein. And reading a book about his wife just sounded really intriguing. This book started with an explanation from the author and I was a little disappointed to read this book was fiction, but still.. I couldn’t wait to start reading. In ‘The Other Einstein’ we read the story of Mileva ‘Mitza’ Maríc. Mitza is a young and brilliant woman, who worked all her life to study and become a physicist. The only problem is that Mitza is a ‘woman’ and it’s 1896. Woman aren’t supposed to study and Mitza has to work twize as hard as the man in her class to get where she wants to go. Now Mitza is studying in an elite school in Zürich, when she meets Albert Einstein. Albert changes everything for Mitza and soon they are working together to get their degree. Especially in the beginning I really enjoyed this story. Marie Benedict really has a good way of writing and making sure her readers are fascinated. I loved getting to know Mitza. Being a woman in a man’s world is very hard. But Mitza worked hard to get where she is, and she has seen the worst of humankind. Mitza definitely is a tough character. But she is also really naive when it comes to Albert. You can’t really blame her since she hasn’t been in contact with many people other than her own family for the first twenty years of her life. But still.. it was frustrating at times. Half way through this book I found the story becoming a little slow. All the scientific talk was a little boring to me and I just wanted the story to get on. After a view of those chapters the story became better again, and I started to enjoy ‘The Other Einstein’ once more. I do have one problem with this book. I don’t know much about Albert Einstein, but in this book he isn’t a very nice person at all and he also isn’t as smart as he is supposed to be. I mean, supposedly his wife Mitza is the master brain behind his research. This bothered me a little. Why couldn’t there be used a different made up name? To me it now feels a little like Albert Einstein is being wronged without any real evidence. Overall, this is a good story about the struggle of woman in the past. But I would have loved it more if it wasn’t fictional, or if there were used other names. I love that cover though! Beautiful!

Great book and very well written.

I enjoyed the writer’s writing talent

4.5 stars. The exact facts may, most likely, never be known, but this really gets you thinking: "who WAS the instigator? Who was the brains? Was it all really who history has led us to believe? I saw the TV programme with Geoffrey Rush a short while ago and had this book in mind since then. With International Women's Day just past, I decided it was a good time to read about the wife and colleague of Einstein, but whose name I didn't even know. Mileva “Mitza” Marić. A true story. A Serbian woman, with a limp, fighting to show she deserves her hard-won place at a Polytechnic in Zurich. Treated with disdain by almost everybody, one other student at first shows kindness and later respect for her mind, her ambition and her great talent for mathematics and physics. He is Albert Einstein. This story charts the rise of Einstein through the eyes of the woman who loved him, and exactly what life there would be for someone in his shadow. Mitza speaks to us directly, and though the author has had to take liberties, surmise, take educated guesses, it feels as though it all COULD be true, things fit the known facts. Mitza shows us just how hard any woman back then would have had to work to show herself even the equal of a man, and how the natural trials of females (pregnancy, childbirth, motherhood, domestic drudgery) severely limited and curtailed their potential. Maddening really. I loved the scenes with Marie Curie, with two female scientists talking about men. I bawled (while listening on the streets!) to some very upsetting scenes of Mitza's first child and her fate. My feelings about Albert steadily changed through Mizta's story and I'm not sure I will ever think of him in quite the same way again, however many liberties have been taken with the truth. I sped through this in less than two days, the narrator's voice on audiobook a personal and involving one. Little-known stories in history are those that make it, that the big events are built on. That deserve to be read and known and remembered. This definitely deserves a wider readership. An early pioneer of important science and a victim of Victorian thinking, Milena both defined and was defined by history. A sample copy of this audiobook was provided by Nudgebooks for an honest review.

Enjoyable

Loved the book read it with my book club

Bien documentado con mezcla de ficción. Te hace sentir el amor que fluye y el coraje que puede producir compartir su vida con alguien como su esposo. Lo recomiendo en su idioma original el vocabulario es muy formal. Me encanta.

Very good and engrossing

This book is about Albert Einstein 's first wife, Mileva "Mitza" Maric, a Serbian woman with a limp whose parents didn't believe she had any hopes of a future with a husband but was rather brilliant with math and science and could possibly have a future as a professor and doing research. Switzerland was a progressive country that was allowing women into its colleges and universities and Mileva was accepted into Swiss Federal Polytechnic in Zurich. She took up lodging at Engelbrecht Pension an all-girl boarding house where she became friends with Milana, Ruzica, and most especially Helena who also had a limp. She had never had friends before.as.She was always teased and ridiculed. In class, Dr. Weber was particularly hard on her because she was a woman and because she was Serbian. One student reaches out to.her and that student was Albert Einstein. He flirted shamefully with her and she turned him down. Her friend Ruzica talked her into going into one of the cafes where Einstein and his friends were having an intellectual discussion on science and she found herself drawn into the discussion. When Einstein found out about the women's playing music after dinner he showed up uninvited with his violin to play with Milena. The other women don't much care for him, though. Helena and Milena have made a pact to not have a man in their lives and to focus on their careers. But soon, Helena has found a man to love and has broken the pact. So, Milena doesn't see why she has to keep the pact too, especially when her mother is encouraging her to pursue romance even though her father is against it. Einstein and Milena have talked about marriage and while Einstein has graduated now and is looking for work, which is hard because his teachers aren't giving him good recommendations due to his absentees from class and his disrespect toward them. Milena took a semester off her second year in order to cool off her feelings for him and got behind in school which meant that she had to wait another year before she could take the test. Einstein talks her into taking a vacation at Lake Como where they can make love before they get married. Milena comes back pregnant and Einstein won't marry her without a steady job. She flunks the exams due to her pregnancy and he refuses to come to her home to talk to her parents about the pregnancy. He has a lead on a job in the Patent Office but for now, he's tutoring. She takes the train up to the next stop to see him but he refuses to take the train up to the next stop to see her. Eventually, her money runs out and she must go back home furious at him for not seeing her. She has a baby girl that he asks her to leave with her parents six months later because he got the patent office job and he listed himself as unmarried and he can't show up with a child in tow. So she does for now. On a paper they worked on together he asks that she take her name off of it in order for him to get better job prospects when he shows it to a friend. A year later their daughter comes down with scarlet fever and dies. On the way home riding the train, she comes up with the Theory of Relativity. The year 1905 was known as Einstein's Year of Wonder. He published four groundbreaking papers. Milena's name was supposed to be on them but he took her name off of them. She was furious. This cracked their marriage. Not to mention the infidelity. Einstein was a real bastard. While this book plays a little fast and loose with the facts in that no one really knows what really happened and the author is imagining what she thinks happened, it is indeed a possibility. You really feel sorry for Milena who loses everything in her association with Einstein. This was a really good book that tells an incredible story. I give it five out of five stars. Quotes I had become the embodiment of the old Serbian phrase the house doesn’t rest on the earth but on the woman. -Marie Benedict (The Other Einstein p 175)

Well worth reading.