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Summary: a journey straight into dreamtime..
Review: After reading each segment of the novel I felt as if I was emerging from a deep daydream. It's a complete escapism and brings the mind of the genius into a form anyone can relate to.
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Summary: Imagine a world in which there is no time. Only images.
Review: 'Einstein's Dreams' is at once delightfully simple and utterly complex. An absolutely enchanting and absorbing read from start to finish. It is philosophical poetry presented in stream-of-conscienceness, and so much more. There is no comparison...Beautiful.
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Summary: Lyrical and Magical
Review: I have read this amazing book no less than 4 times. The firsttime I couldn't put it down and read right through. The second time,I read one chapter at a time (pun intended), thinking and rethinking. And each time since it just makes me smile.Lightman's ability to create a tableau around the scene he describes is nothing less than magical. As you begin to read this thought-provoking little treasure, you quickly realize that either Lightman or Einstein is there with you, and you are not reading. You are being read to. If you like to think about time and the world, this book will blow your mind. If you just love reading wonderful books and discovering amazing new ways to look at the world, you will hug this one to your breast and re-read it as many times as I have. The chapter that describes time running backwards is still a favorite cocktail party conversation for me. And drives everyone I know to find this book and read every chapter.
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Summary: A Sublime Masterpiece
Review: What is this thing called "time," and why did we create it? That is what Alan Lightman asks. most of us will glance at our watch and carry on, lightman takes us inside the clocks on our wrists, towers and desks and forces us to see over 30 different dimensions in which time is, as Lightman puts it, a bodily time, not a mechanical time. Time has nothing to do with 6:30 am or time for lunch, and everything to do with the loves of our lives coming just around the corner to meet us for the first time, and first kisses, and death, desire, pain, joy. Lightman fascinatingly blames time for nearly every circumstance we encounter in our daily lives, and shows that if it weren't for this man-made thing, "time," our understanding of life and the world would be universally different. Einstein's Dreams is a downright frightening work of genius, and the beautiful simplicity of Lightman's writing style begs for a second or even third read.
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Summary: An Excellent Book
Review: When I first picked up the book, I was immediatly blown away by the content of the book. It was very interesting and the book was hard to put down. It is a pretty fast read and I guarantee that you will be blown away by Einstein's Dreams.
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Summary: Entertaining and Educational
Review: I am currently in my senior year of high school, with senioritis already taking over. I am slacking off as much as I can, so when I was assigned a fourth book to read for English, I was less than thrilled, especially one about physics and time. I would have been immensly disappointed if I had slacked off with this book. I was assigned to read up to the first interlude (only eight dreams) and couldn't stop reading it until I was done. It was one of the few books I didn't want to stop reading until I was finished. Usually school selected reading books are less than thrilling, usually with the point covering a few pages somewhere during the hundreds of pages it took to build to that point. Lightman created thirty points, each covering several pages that spanned the whole book. Although his style contains minor annoyances, his novel (If you can even call it a novel) was brilliant and got me to overcome my slacking, if only for a few hours.
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Summary: A visionary look at endless possiblilities
Review: This book is simply a tidal wave of creative thinking and eloquent writing. If you like to have your entire perception of the world changed, this is the book for you. Cheers to Lightman for his outstanding ability to capture the imagination of his reader with releastic alternative realities. Absolutely mind shattering, paradigm obliterating, and awe inspiring material.
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Summary: Some people refuse to stop wondering the great beyond
Review: This book makes me cry, laugh, and feel a lust for like that few in life will ever know. Indescribable in its poetic genious, and jaw dropping implications. I can't stop wondering about the endless possibilities that lounge in the secrets of our universe. Lightman makes you think about the world in such ways that the mass of society would surely frown upon it. This is not a book for the so called "pseudo-intelluctal", but for a reader who questions traditions and the world around them. Anyone who reads this needs to be open to a shifting of their paradigm structure as they know it. Read it and learn!
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Summary: Literary Science
Review: It's rare that a writer can mix the real with the fantastical. Lightman is a true master of words, and he uses that mastery to convey some wondrous physics ideas in this book. If you like physics, or if you love something creative and imaginative, please read this book!
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Summary: Breathtaking in its simplicity and scope! A marvel!
Review: Alan Lightman's Einstein's Dreams is essentially a book on physics that is explained through literary technique: the novel. Each chapter is a new date in time that explains vast possibilities of what time is and could be. Time is past, present and future. What if people lived only in the past and never had to deal with the future or those who lived in the future and never had to worry about the past? Or those who just lived in the present and never heard of a past or future? Lightman explores what each one means on an individual basis and how it could affect humanity if only one existed and not the others. The reader will discover the awe of what Einstein knew when he himself came to these revelations -- perhaps a little less grand in scale. Past, present and future are all interconnected; they can't be mitigated in terms of 'more important' vs. 'less important.' That simply does not exist in Einstein's Dreams, literally. The author looks at each individual case in every chapter and shows the beauty of living a life only in the past or present or future. But he also shows the unpleasantness of it. Thus, he makes the reader appreciate the actuality of physics and how it functions in everyday life. The scenes of where all this theory manifests itself is a little European village near the Alps, the River Aare and the Marktgasse (street) nearby where Einstein has his office. The European and descriptive flavor that is added to the simple and uncluttered language makes the story more quaint, insular and easy to grasp. At the close, the book becomes a wonderful, soaring learning and reading experience.
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