TWO ENGROSSING BOOKS

A long time ago, it seems, I wrote only a little about Unbroken, perhaps the best book ever written of its kind, and I have loaned it out to a friend here where I live. She has completed reading it and enjoyed it, if you can say such a story is enjoyable. The ultimate message in it is, of course, enjoyable. I would not care to see the movie of it, for two reasons. One, that ultimate message is not in the movie; second, there is no way that much of it could be filmed realistically. But I want to leave that book for a minute or so and talk about the other book. 

It is Einstein by Walter Isaacson, copyrighted in 2007 which must have been the year I purchased it. I got about a third of the way through reading it, and then I had other important fish to fry. But after Unbroken it was time to finish reading Einstein. It is a heavy book, with 564 pages down to the section of notes. I am roughly 3/5 finished. Some days and nights there is no opportunity to read at all. I anticipate doing so for a few minutes tonight. 

Einstein is an extremely well-written volume, about an extremely brilliant mind. So, I want to study physics! This is  not the first book to make me wish that. Eve Curie'a biography of her famous mother, Marie Curie, also made me want to study physics. But this book gave me an inkling of what Einstein's Theory of Relatively is. He wrote a simple book for less brilliant minds to understand it. I'd like to get that book, but I wouldn't have time to study physics, now really, would I? 

But I bring up this book, in relation to Unbroken, for when the Einsteins were traveling the world, they made a brief visit to Japan. The theoretical physicist could not praise the Japanese enough, everything about them. It was before WWII and Einstein had no idea that the Japanese planned to rule the world and enslave many thousands of people from other countries. Einstein would not have approved Japan's brutality such as what Louie Zamperini suffered in Unbroken. Where I am reading in Einstein, Hitler is already on the rise, and anti-Semitism is spreading. We know that this particular German Jew escaped in time and became an American citizen. But millions upon millions of other Jews did not escape. 

I want to point out a difference in the brutality of Germany and of Japan: the Jews in Germany's bloody hands died more quickly than did the multinational prisoners in Japan's evil claws. Some of them slowly starved to death along with other atrocities. Life is not worth anything to hoodlums at war.