Ask an adult what Einstein did and you will usually get the hair, the photograph with the tongue, and the word genius. Very few can tell you what he worked out. That is the gap this book is trying to close, and it closes about two thirds of it.
Jess Brallier wrote it for the Who Was? series, so you already know the shape before you open it: one life told straight through from a difficult childhood to a famous death, short chapters, a black and white drawing every few pages, sidebars for the things that will not fit the main line. The template is fixed. What varies from book to book is how much real content the writer gets inside it, and that is the only question worth asking about any of them.
The science it actually teaches
This one earns its place on our Stealth Science shelf because it does not stop at the legend. It names the ideas and it tries to explain them, which is more than most books at this level attempt.
Start with the method, because the method is the best thing in the book. A teenage Einstein asks what a beam of light would look like if you could run alongside it at its own speed. You cannot run that experiment. There is no equipment. So you run it in your head, obeying the physics you already know, and you follow it to wherever it goes. Where it goes is this: you would be looking at light standing still, and light standing still is not a thing that exists. So something in the question is wrong. That is a thought experiment, and a child who understands what just happened has learned something they can use for the rest of their life.
The fix is the strange part. Light travels at the same speed for everyone measuring it, no matter how fast the person measuring is moving. Nothing else behaves that way. Throw a ball from a moving truck and the ball gets the truck's speed added on. Light does not. And if the speed of light is fixed, then speed's other two ingredients have to give instead, because speed is distance over time. So a moving clock runs slow and a moving ruler is short. Not as an optical trick. Actually.
Then E equals mc squared, which almost everybody can recite and almost nobody can say. Mass and energy are the same thing in two forms, and the number that converts one into the other is the speed of light multiplied by itself. That is a colossal number, which is why a very small amount of matter holds a frightening amount of energy, and why the last stretch of Einstein's life is tangled up with a weapon.
Then gravity, and here the book has to correct something your child probably already believes. Newton said gravity is a pull that reaches across empty space. Einstein said gravity is a shape. Mass bends the space around it, and anything moving nearby follows the bend, including light, which has no weight for a pull to grab hold of. That claim is testable. Starlight passing close to the sun should be bent by a measurable amount, and the only time you can see stars next to the sun is during an eclipse.
And one thing that is not physics but matters more than most of the physics. He did the work that made his name while employed as a patent examiner. He had a desk, a job, a boss, and a stack of applications, and he thought about light in the gaps. Children who believe science happens in laboratories full of equipment need to see that.
The child it lands with
The asker. The child who wants to know what is underneath the answer you just gave, and then what is underneath that one. Einstein is the patron saint of that child, and this is the first book that will tell them the man had a day job and years of getting nowhere.
There is a second child this suits, and it is a different child. The one who has quietly decided that being bad at school means being bad at thinking. Some version of school trouble is in this book, and it lands hard on that kid.
On level: the store bands it 2 to 5. The vocabulary sits comfortably around third grade, but the ideas in it are older than the words. A strong second grader will read every sentence and take home about half of it. That is not a reason to wait. It is a reason to be in the room.
One place to stop and talk
Do not let your child read past the light beam. Put the question to them cold, before the book answers it. If you could run as fast as a beam of light, right alongside it, what would you see?
Let them answer. Then the second question, which is the one that does the work: could that ever actually happen? Two questions, four minutes, and your child has just done science instead of reading about it.
What to know going in
This is a gentle book with nothing frightening in it, and there are still two things to know.
The first is the bomb. The book has to deal with it and a short book cannot deal with it well. Einstein signed a letter urging the American government to build an atomic weapon, he did not work on building it, and he spent his remaining years arguing against the thing he had helped set moving. Compressed into a few pages, that can flatten into something much simpler and much worse, which is that the kind old man with the hair made the bomb. If your child is the sort who takes that kind of thing to bed with them, be nearby for those pages.
The second is the legend. You will meet the story that Einstein failed at school. Some school conflict is real. The specific claim that he failed mathematics is not true, he was ahead in it, and the story survives because people like it. Worth knowing before your child repeats it at the table as a fact.
On depth, plainly: there is no mathematics in this book. Your child will finish it able to say what relativity claims and unable to work anything out with it. That is the right trade at eight, and it is worth knowing you are making it.
Where to get it
It is $6.99 at Who Was Albert Einstein?, which is about what the paperback is worth: a solid, unremarkable, genuinely useful couple of hours. If your child is new to the Stealth Science shelf, this is not the one to start on. The ideas here are the hardest in the series and they go down better once a child has already read about somebody who built things with their hands. Buy it second, and buy it knowing you will be answering questions about time for a week afterwards.
If your child liked this one
Books we have written about that sit close to this one, by reading level and by subject.
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Grade 3 to 6
Mission to Pluto: One Pass, No Brakes
Mission to Pluto: The First Visit to an Ice Dwarf and the Kuiper Belt by Mary Kay Carson
Grade 5 to 8
Who Really Killed Cock Robin? A Food Web as a Suspect List
Who Really Killed Cock Robin?: An Ecological Mystery by Jean Craighead George
Grade 4 to 7
Browse every book we have written about by age, by kind of book and by subject: Find the right book for your child. Or see the whole Stealth Science shelf.
