*Starred Review* Shortly before his death, Albert Einstein pledged that his home would never become a shrine for pilgrims. Yet, in this collection of essays published (belatedly, by one year) to commemorate the centenary of the year in which Einstein completed his special theory of relativity, the authors sound very much like reverent pilgrims. One of the contributors even acknowledges that he has constructed a shrine to Einstein, complete with the holy (and autographed) photographic image. Several of the contributors highlight the irony of the near deification of a scientist whose disheveled appearance and impish humor were far from Olympian. Still, the contributors to this remarkably accessible and lively volume--themselves distinguished scientists, historians, and science writers--recognize in the gnomic Swiss patent clerk powers transcending normal human limits. Even in Einstein's errors, contributors detect signs of brilliance. Thus, in what Einstein labeled his greatest blunder (his introduction of a cosmological constant into his equation for cosmic gravity), an Ohio physicist detects an insight too quickly abandoned. The same spirit of admiration pervades what contributors say about Einstein as a citizen-scientist, devoted to peace yet realistic enough to call for an American atom-bomb project. A couple of contributors challenge the iconic image of Einstein, exposing his heedless romantic conduct and his vain hopes for a strictly causal physics. But the criticisms only briefly interrupt appreciative reflections on the legacy of the greatest modern scientist. Bryce Christensen
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