Perhaps sensing this, the publishers of Brothers in Arms claim that it depicts the events surrounding the assassination “in a narrative non-fiction format, using … techniques of the most highly readable novels.” Written by veteran investigative reporter Gus Russo in collaboration with novelist and screenwriter Stephen Molton, this elegantly composed book depicts those few seconds in Dallas as being the culmination of a blood feud between two sets of brothers, the Castros and Kennedys. While Fidel and John were the figureheads in this war, it is really Raúl Castro and especially Bobby Kennedy—the “altar boy [who] had grown up to become a Savonarola in a rumpled Brooks Brothers suit”—who were its field marshals. Indeed, it’s R.F.K. who comes across as the truly tragic figure here, bearing significant responsibility for his brother’s death, yet prevented from avenging it by world-historical events beyond his control.

For Messrs. Russo and Molton, the trail to Dealey Plaza begins in Minsk, where Lee Harvey Oswald washed up after defecting to the Soviet Union in 1959. There, he came to the attention of the Cubans, who had spies training in the city. After Oswald’s repatriation to Texas in 1962, Cuban intelligence, led by Raúl, kept tabs on this odd character, supporting him with small sums of money and subtle encouragement. Not that he was ever an actual operative, the authors maintain, since “he was neither smart enough nor mentally reliable enough to be trusted. What he was, within weeks of his arrival, was a Cuban-aligned sleeper agent, a potential asset who might prove useful to Havana one day.”

According to this theory, Oswald’s increasingly erratic behavior stemmed from his desire to “prove his devotion to Fidel’s cause.” His attempted assassination of the right-wing firebrand General Edwin Walker, his flirtation with anti-Cuban groups in New Orleans and, ultimately, his plan to kill J.F.K. were all part of an effort to earn him a place in Cuba’s revolution. He finally took his dossier to Mexico City in late September of ’63, where he presented it at the Cuban embassy. Soon, the authors maintain, he was meeting with high-ranking Cuban intelligence officials and even having an affair with a beautiful embassy employee. By the time he returned to Texas, the Cubans had decided to egg him on to kill Kennedy with false promises of sanctuary.

But why would Castro risk provoking the lethal ire of a superpower that had already attempted to crush his government? Messrs. Russo and Molton argue that Cubans’ gambit was a reaction to intelligence that the Kennedy brothers, Bobby in particular, were planning to reprise the Bay of Pigs operation with another attempt to overthrow Castro’s regime, in late 1963. By playing Oswald, the joker in their pack, the Cubans not only forestalled the coup, but also insulated themselves against payback from L.B.J., who knew that blaming Havana would necessitate a retaliation that would involve the Russians and risk a nuclear holocaust. As for Bobby, he had an added incentive to bury the plot, since pursuing “a Cuban angle would expose the White House’s own murder plotting, marring Jack’s name for all time.”

There’s something deeply intriguing about the picture the authors paint of the beleaguered Cubans taking an interest in this bizarre young man who showed up on their doorstep, then letting him run to see what kind of mischief he could wreak. It’s only when Messrs. Russo and Molton stray beyond the realm of plausible fiction by trying to establish a factual record of active Cuban support for Oswald on the ground in Dallas that their story loses its mythic power.

LEGACY OF SECRECY proves, in many ways, to be a mirror image of Brothers in Arms. Written by veteran Kennedy investigator Lamar Waldron (assisted by Air America host Thom Hartmann), it asserts that Oswald was in fact an anti-Castro agent involved in a C.I.A. plot to overthrow the Cuban leader, which was slated to take place just days after Kennedy’s killing. “Oswald’s trip to Mexico City in September 1963 was probably his attempt to enter Cuba,” the authors assert, “as one of the assets the CIA was tasked with getting into Cuba for the upcoming … coup plan.” What the C.I.A. didn’t know was that elements of the Mafia, who had been used in earlier schemes to knock off Castro, had infiltrated the plot and turned it against Kennedy. Their motive was to strike back at Bobby, the notoriously anti-Mafia attorney general, as well as to get their casinos back into Cuba, something J.F.K. opposed.

Like Messrs. Russo and Molton’s Cubans, the Mafia were emboldened by the knowledge that Bobby could not come after them, since to do so would expose his brother’s illegal plotting against Castro, as well as risk a confrontation with the Soviet Union. “As a result, Robert Kennedy and other high officials had to withhold key information in order to prevent, in the words of President Johnson, a nuclear holocaust that could cost the lives of ‘forty million Americans.’”

Although Legacy of Secrecy is exhaustively researched, the new “conclusive evidence” it boasts of presenting often proves to be less than convincing. For instance, the confession of the plot’s alleged mastermind, New Orleans crime boss Carlos Marcello, is nothing more than a single bit of hearsay reported by a prison informant. Similarly, the new “proof” of C.I.A. involvement comes during a drunken anti-J.F.K. tirade by the operations chief at its Miami station, David Morales, in which he declares, “We took care of that son of a bitch, didn’t we?”

Even more tenuous are the authors’ attempts to implicate the Mafia conspirators in the killings of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. In the case of King, they claim that a Georgia racist named Joseph Milteer, who was allegedly a minor player in the J.F.K. plot, asked Marcello to provide a hit man to kill the civil rights leader. The don, a fellow racist, obliged by offering a small-time drug-runner named James Earl Ray. As for Bobby, the authors strain the reader’s credulity to the breaking point when they posit very flimsy evidence that R.F.K.’s killer, Sirhan Sirhan, was in some way connected through his lawyer to mobsters behind the killing of both J.F.K. and King.

FOR ITS PART, JAMES W. Douglass’ JFK and the Unspeakable puts forward a scenario in which J.F.K. was cut down by a C.I.A.-administered plot that used Oswald as a patsy. Mr. Douglass, “a longtime peace activist,” believes Kennedy was murdered by shadowy forces because he was in the process of renouncing the cold war and all its toxic legacies: the arms race, Vietnam, the anti-Castro campaign, even predatory capitalism in the form of Big Steel. Using language borrowed from Thomas Merton, Mr. Douglass describes the plot as being informed by a vague force of evil “whose depth and deceit seemed to go beyond the capacity of words to describe.” Just who represents this unspeakable force remains unspecified. “We have no evidence as to who in the military-industrial complex may have been given the order to assassinate President Kennedy. That the order was carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency is obvious. The CIA’s fingerprints are all over the crime and the events leading up to it.”

To support this theory, the author deploys a selective rehashing of such conspiracy chestnuts as the Altgens photo, which allegedly shows Oswald standing in the doorway of the Texas Book Depository at the exact moment he should have been firing away on the sixth floor. The book’s real interest lies in its portrait of J.F.K. as a man who, after the Bay of Pigs and the near-apocalypse of the Cuban missile crisis, was in the process of turning away from the saber rattling of the early days of his presidency. Dissenters will point to his authorization of a second action against Castro and the deadly 1963 coup against Vietnamese president Diem as evidence that the J.F.K. who went to Dallas was the same old cold warrior. Mr. Douglass, however, does make a convincing case that J.F.K. was becoming deeply disillusioned with the bellicosity of American foreign policy and the inordinate power of the military-industrial complex.

Whether this got him killed remains, like just about everything else that happened in Dallas, the stuff of myth.

Stephen Amidon’s new novel, Security, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in February. He can be reached at books@observer.com.

To their immense credit, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, two dynamic young conservative thinkers, freely admit the comprehensive failure of George W. Bush’s so-called "compassionate conservatism." They acknowledge that the blue-collar voters who were supposed to benefit from his policies are feeling more beleaguered now than at any time since the recessionary 1970s. In Grand New Party, their intriguing outline for Republican revitalization, they don’t even bother trying to say something good about our 42nd president. (Efforts in that direction are making many of their colleagues sound as desperate as senators caught poking their feet beneath a toilet stall divider.) Coming across more like indignant liberal bloggers than neocon wonks, Messrs. Douthat and Salam make it clear that "the buck stops with Bush himself, who articulated a vision of a working-class conservatism but failed to follow through."

It could have been so different. If Mr. Bush had been at all serious, he might have used the vast political capital bestowed on him after 9/11 to push through social programs that would have finished the political realignment that began with the collapse of the New Deal in the 1960s and 1970s. If he’d only spent a little less time dirt-biking at Crawford, he could have built a streamlined federal government whose ministrations created self-sufficiency among the working class, not dependency; one that, in the words of Ronald Reagan, was designed to "work with us, not over us; to stand by our side, not ride on our back." Instead, the working class—and everyone else—got Katrina, Enron and Fallujah.

And yet, according to the authors, there’s still time for the Republicans to salvage their future. The key is to understand the peculiar anxieties of America’s contemporary working class—Sam’s Club voters, as the authors call them—and tailor a new agenda to their needs. According to Messrs. Douthat and Salam, Sam’s Club voters are non-college-educated but not impoverished, socially conservative but also convinced that government should play a role in their lives. They’re outraged at the sight of people in New Orleans on welfare, but even more outraged by what happened to these same people during Katrina. Most of all, they’re worried—about health care, college tuition, vanishing jobs, unchecked immigration and rising crime. Win them, and a permanent majority can be born, just as F.D.R. was able to create a 50-year supremacy for Congressional Democrats by speaking to the hopes and fears of their grandparents.

For Messrs. Douthat and Salam, the cornerstone of this conservative revival is the family. It should be noted that they’re not indulging in the reactionary rhetoric of the Falwellian troglodytes here, but simply recognizing that members of the working class fare much better when part of a nuclear family than when they go it alone. Anticipating howls of outrage from progressives, they point out the current "marriage gap," in which many of those doing the howling—college-educated, upper-middle-class members of the new meritocracy—are far more likely to live in long-lasting, child-bearing marriages than the working class. "Pick a social indicator," they assert, "and you’ll find that parents and children alike do far better in stable families."

Having established the primacy of family, the authors then float a raft of policies that sails into the tricky waters between conservative and progressive doctrine. Take employment. Although Messrs. Douthat and Salam are contemptuous of welfare in its Great Society incarnation, they also understand that some fairly hefty government incentives are going to be needed to keep the working poor from sinking into an underclass. Their answer is a program of wage subsidies, wherein "less-educated single men with low-paying jobs make ends meet, thereby making them more desirable marriage partners. Given the right boost, poor young men could become working-class fathers" and, presumably, Sam’s Club voters with a lifelong fealty to the G.O.P. In education, they moot a modified voucher system in which working-class children will be granted more credit than their more affluent neighbors as they search for a good school, so that "poor kids, who will have the most money strapped to their backs, would attract the most attention from entrepreneurial principals eager to expand their bailiwick."

If those schemes sound like Clintonian triangulation from the right, it’s because that’s what they are. In fact, once you get past the liberal-bashing rhetoric, and the occasional fuzzy talk about "private virtue and cultural solidarity," it’s hard to see what’s so conservative about the authors’ agenda, or at least what makes it uniquely Republican. At times, it seems as if the spendthrift liberal bogeyman they conjure to stand in opposition to their suggestions has a lot more to do with the perfervid fantasies of National Review subscribers than what’s actually going on at the DNC.

Take their idea about fighting global warming, which involves creating "an agency dedicated to funding alternative-energy research" carried out by entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. The authors claim that this approach "is vastly preferable to the sort of massive, growth-killing regulatory regime promoted by the left," ignoring the fact that Al Gore has been talking about finding market-driven, technological solutions to global warming for years now.

In the end, these aspersions seem like nothing more than playing to the right-wing gallery in order to sell a program that is going to be a lot easier for Nancy Pelosi to stomach than Mitch McConnell. Post-Goldwater Republican strategy has never been about constructive engagement with the working class, but rather about scaring the hell out of it, whether the object of fear be mushroom clouds, hippies, school busing, welfare queens, Willie Horton, married gays or sleeper cells. Asking politicians weaned on 40 years of fear to change tack is a tall order, especially when it’s been so bloody effective.

What’s more, whatever else Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam are talking about here, they’re proposing spending tax dollars—a lot of them, at least in the short term. They’re also talking about getting the federal government deeply involved in the lives of working-class citizens, whether it involves bolstering their wages, providing their children with means-tested school vouchers or paying for their health care once their medical bills pass a certain threshold. Attractive ideas, perhaps, though after eight years of rudderless drift under the banner of compassionate conservatism, it’s hard to see how any kind of real majority is going to rally under a Republican flag anytime soon.

Unless, of course, it’s the red flag of fear.

Stephen Amidon’s most recent novel is Human Capital (Picador). He can be reached at books@observer.com.

Soon after Katrina devastated New Orleans, a Florida airline named Help Jet announced its plan to be “the first hurricane escape plan that turns a hurricane evacuation into a jet-setter vacation.” As Naomi Klein recounts in The Shock Doctrine, her compelling study of the dark heart of contemporary capitalism, the idea was to scoop up an entitled few as the storm approached and jet them off to “five-star golf resorts, spas or Disneyland.” Those who could not afford seats would presumably have to wait for nonexistent buses.

While such a scheme would have seemed outlandish just a decade ago, Ms. Klein shows that the Help Jet concept is in tune with an exploding business trend. The smart money these days is in catastrophe: Hurricanes, tsunamis, political upheavals and wars have become the new profit points in the age of “disaster capitalism,” which sees cataclysms “as exciting market opportunities.”

It’s a movement rooted in the laissez-faire theories of the late economist Milton Friedman and his disciples at the University of Chicago. “Friedman dreamed of depatterning societies,” Ms. Klein reminds us, “of returning them to a state of pure capitalism, cleansed of all interruptions—government regulations, trade barriers and entrenched interests.” The problem was that though Friedman claimed his ideology went hand in glove with spreading democracy, “free people just didn’t seem to vote for politicians who followed his advice.”

Friedman’s blueprint for pure capitalism—known as “neoliberalism”—was finally given its big chance in 1973 in Chile, when the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende was violently overthrown by Augusto Pinochet. From the outset, the brutal dictator relied on a group of Freidman-inspired academics known as the “Chicago Boys” to radically restructure the nation’s economy. Obstacles were removed by mass arrests, torture and summary execution. Shock capitalism was born: “The shock of the coup prepared the ground for the economic shock therapy; the shock of the torture chamber terrorized anyone thinking of standing in the way of the economic shocks. Out of this live laboratory emerged the first Chicago School state.”

Since then, this process of nondemocratic free market revolution has been repeated time and time again. Lacking the consent of the voters, Chicago Boys throughout the world have applied severe shocks to disorient the population, whereupon a period of rapid change could be carried out before anyone understood what was happening. Although these traumas were often violent, they also involved such economy-wrecking techniques as “debt bombs,” whereby a new government would be saddled with the debt of the corrupt regime it replaced. Once the society was put into a state of shock, long-standing public institutions could be privatized and plundered, leading to increased unemployment, hyperinflation—and vast wealth for corporations and well-connected individuals.

From post-Communist Russia and Poland to post-apartheid South Africa, the democratic aspirations of liberated people were thwarted by Chicago Boys, often working out of the I.M.F. and The World Bank. Nowhere was the incompatibility of shock capitalism and democracy more apparent than in China, where “democracy and Chicago School economics were not proceeding hand in hand; they were on opposite sides of the barricades surrounding Tiananmen Square.”

And it wasn’t just political upheaval that abetted these financial jackals. Natural disasters such as Katrina and the Asian tsunami of 2004 gave the Chicago Boys golden opportunities to outsource functions that had long been seen as primarily governmental, such as disaster relief. Sri Lanka was particularly hard hit by a “second tsunami” of developers who saw the destruction of traditional fishing communities as their opening to finally transform the nation’s pristine beaches into luxury resorts.

The result of this reliance on shock has been the creation of a “disaster capitalism complex,” which is “a movement that prays for crisis the way drought-struck farmers pray for rain, and the way Christian-Zionist end-timers pray for the Rapture.” With the attacks of 9/11, the complex came into its own. Since the tech bubble had already burst and venture capital was in search of new destinations, the world’s economy was easily transformed. “In just a few years, the homeland security industry, which barely existed before 9/11, has exploded to a size that is now significantly larger than either Hollywood or the music business.”

Disaster capitalism saw its culmination in President Bush’s attack on Iraq. For decades, Friedman and his chief acolytes (who include Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld) had been searching for the perfect “blank slate” upon which they could write their free market theories; a nation whose existing structures and institutions had been completely stripped away. The U.S. military and L. Paul Bremer III obliged them. Seen through the lens of Naomi Klein’s analysis, the dogmatic insanity of the American occupiers—dismissing competent public employees and auctioning off functioning government services—makes horrifying sense, right down to Mr. Rumsfeld’s decision to allow the looting of the nation’s cultural identity.

The most problematic aspect of Ms. Klein’s book is her discussion of the special place torture plays in disaster capitalism. From Santiago’s national stadium to Abu Ghraib, torture has indeed followed close on the heels of Freidman-esque experiments, leading the author to assert that “it has been a silent partner in the global free-market crusade.” While this has a certain metaphorical aptness—Ms. Klein equates economic shock with electroshock therapy—the author occasionally seems to lose sight of the fact that Hitler, Stalin and Mao, the century’s grand torturers, were engaged in crusades that had nothing to do with free markets. Torture is a weapon not of capitalism but of all antidemocratic revolutions.

Despite the rampaging success of the Chicago Boys, Ms. Klein sees the makings of a backlash. Mr. Bush’s desire to turn Iraq into a strip mall has run up against intractable opposition, forcing him to scale back many of his more ambitious schemes. “Bush’s in-house disaster capitalists didn’t wipe Iraq clean,” Ms. Klein notes, “they just stirred it up.” And there’s encouraging news from Latin America, the birthplace of Friedman’s experiment, where democracies likes Brazil, Uruguay and Venezuela are opting out of the I.M.F. and turning their backs on free market “reforms.” Some people, it seems, have seen so many of the Chicago Boys’ tricks that they can no longer be shocked by them.

Stephen Amidon’s most recent novel is Human Capital (Picador).

Readers who found Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink stronger on anecdote than analysis will welcome this incisive study by a psychologist whose research provided one of the bases for Mr. Gladwell’s best seller. Gerd Gigerenzer, a director of the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, maintains that gut feelings, partial ignorance and selective forgetting are more important in making rapid decisions than a wealth of information and rigorous logic. “Without cognitive limitations,” he claims, “we would not function as intelligently as we do.” When it comes to making the right choice, he maintains, less is often more.

Deploying surprising data and entertaining graphics, Mr. Gigerenzer shows how humans use a process he calls the “recognition heuristic” as a shortcut for arriving at decisions. Simply put, this means that when faced with a choice between something familiar and something unknown, people tend to opt for the former, and this choice is often correct. For example, a group of German students fared better than their American counterparts when asked whether Detroit or Milwaukee had the larger population. The reason was simple: Most of the Germans had never heard of Milwaukee, so they correctly deduced that it must be smaller. Americans, who had heard of both cities, managed to tie themselves in knots trying to figure out proper reasons for their guess.

Another key concept the author champions is “take the best,” which essentially means that important decisions are often based on one good reason rather than a whole shopping list. When surveyed about how they would choose a doctor in an emergency involving their child, a group of parents responded overwhelmingly that they would be happier relying on a single criterion (such as willingness to listen) than trying to satisfy an array of preconditions.

As part of his argument in favor of intuition, Mr. Gigerenzer points out the damage that overanalysis is inflicting on the U.S. health care system. “My own conviction is that physicians already use simple rules of thumb but for fear of lawsuits do not always admit it.” The result is a data-flooded, test-crazy system on the brink of collapse. Far better, he suggests, to let the doctor tap the aquifer of expertise percolating in his unconscious.

Although it’s difficult to argue with Mr. Gigerenzer’s analysis of how the decision-making process often works, the author seems a bit too enamored of the benefits of rules of thumb over more deliberative, logic-dependent decision making. While it’s true that a wise doctor can be worth a thousand M.R.I.’s, it’s also true that the “recognition heuristic” can be easily manipulated by advertisers who spend billions to plant brand names in our unconscious so we will purchase products no better than their rivals. More dangerously, our intuition, far from a being a fount of wisdom, can be polluted by the Karl Roves of the world, who know that irrational fear is the deepest gut feeling of all. Gerd Gigerenzer may be right to mock the man who writes out a list of a woman’s attributes before deciding to marry her, but one can only wonder how different things would be if America’s voters had been equally deliberative in 2004.

Stephen Amidon’s most recent novel is Human Capital (Picador).

In early 1931, Albert Einstein paid a visit to California that confirmed his status as a global celebrity. After being serenaded by 500 local girls upon his arrival in San Diego, he attended the Rose Bowl parade and visited Hollywood studios, all the while tracked by a gaggle of reporters. The visit’s key moment came when another tramp-like icon, Charlie Chaplin, invited him to attend the premiere of City Lights. They were greeted by rapturous applause, whereupon Chaplin explained to his bemused guest that “people cheer me because they all understand me, and they cheer you because nobody understands you.”

Both Jürgen Neffe and Walter Isaacson feature this anecdote in their new biographies of the 20th century’s greatest scientist. It’s easy to see why. Not only does it underline the adoration that the physicist engendered among a public that was largely ignorant of his theories, but it also hints at a biographer’s dilemma when faced with a subject who so deeply mixes familiarity and obscurity. Because we cannot do the math, our adulation of Einstein relies heavily on faith in the purity of his soul. Few college students tack his poster above their beds because they admire his use of the Ricci tensor; they do it because they see a prophet’s all-knowing, all-forgiving grace in those crinkly eyes (the purported model for Spielberg’s E.T.)

Mr. Neffe, a German science journalist, takes a bracingly corrective stance toward his hallowed subject in Einstein, a best-seller when published in the physicist’s native land two years ago. The author is capable of admiration, but the book falls well short of hagiography: “Rarely has a single individual been so farsighted and myopic at the same time.” Mr. Neffe’s Einstein is a darker character than the kindly, pacifistic, absent-minded professor of popular legend. The biographer reveals “another Einstein, genius and lover, in his magnificence and his cruelty.”

Certainly, the lineaments of the mythical story are still here—the dreamy childhood, the astonishing 1905 theoretical breakthroughs while working full time in a patent office, the pacifism and flight from Hitler, the shambling dotage in Princeton. But there’s also a portrait of a deeply troubled family man, a trait most notable in his relationship with his first wife, Serbian-born Mileva Maric. Mr. Neffe recounts the sad story surrounding the abandonment of their illegitimate daughter, Lieserl, and scolds that “it is remarkable that Einstein never saw his first child …. It would not have been impossible to do so.” Mr. Neffe also has harsh words about Einstein’s relationship with his two sons: “Einstein’s vacillating behavior toward his children inflicted permanent damage on them.” He even hints that Einstein might have abused Mileva. “Supposedly the divorce papers—which are under lock and key in Jerusalem—also make mention of violence in their marriage.”

Mr. Neffe takes a mixed view of Einstein’s political career. Einstein’s pacifism and his Zionism are pictured as blending “productive contributions and counterproductive faux pas.” As for America, Mr. Neffe claims that Einstein’s shoddy treatment by the F.B.I. and his horror at McCarthyism caused him to “shed any illusions about a freedom-loving America, and the last five years of his life may well have been the saddest chapter of his life.” In the end, Mr.
Neffe’s portrait depicts a theoretician of unprecedented creativity and clarity whose forays into the real world were shot through with chaos and contradiction. One closes this rigorously researched and finely written biography full of admiration for the scientist, but perhaps a little less inclined to pin his visage between Bono and the Dalai Lama on the dorm-room wall.

THE REVOLUTIONARY INSIGHT OF EINSTEIN'S SPECIAL theory of relativity was that there’s no such thing as a privileged observer. As Mr. Neffe points out, “[n]o frame of reference is preferred or absolute; every point of view is equal.” Contrasting Mr. Neffe’s book to Walter Isaacson’s far gentler Einstein: His Life and Universe would seem to confirm the hypothesis. Although both men describe the same phenomenon, their points of view are markedly dissimilar. For instance, where Mr. Neffe claims that Einstein “failed miserably at marriage—twice,” Mr. Isaacson paints a very different portrait of his second marriage, to his cousin Elsa. “So even if it was not the stuff of poetry, the bond between them was a solid one. It was forged by satisfying each other’s desires and needs, it was genuine, and it worked in both directions.” His parenting is considerably less destructive here, particularly with his eldest son, Hans Albert.

Although the father and son had troubled relations when the boy was a teen, according to Mr. Isaacson, they became close after Hans Albert immigrated to America—hardly the stuff of permanent damage. Mr. Isaacson, a former managing editor at Time magazine and biographer of Henry Kissinger and Ben Franklin, also breaks with Mr. Neffe on Einstein’s attitude toward his tenure in America. Einstein, he claims, simply did not “fully appreciate how resilient America’s democracy and its nurturing of individual liberty could be. So for a while his disdain deepened. But he was saved from serious despair by his wry detachment and his sense of humor. He was not destined to die a bitter man.”

Is Mr. Isaacson’s view too rosy? His account of the great arc of Einstein’s life is certainly very satisfying. The depiction of Einstein’s quixotic efforts to come up with a unified-field theory, which consumed the last 25 years of his life and bore no fruit (at least to date), is particularly good. During this period, Einstein went from being the revolutionary outsider who toppled the certainties of Newtonian physics to a reactionary old-guarder who could not accept the indeterminacy of Werner Heisenberg’s and Niels Bohr’s quantum mechanics. He could never admit that our physical universe was random and irrational. According to Mr. Isaacson, this faith repeated itself in his concurrent efforts to create a “one-world” political structure that would obviate suffering, war and the atomic weapons for which he was held at least partially responsible. “Just as he sought a unified theory in science that could govern the cosmos, so he sought one in politics that could govern the planet, one that would overcome the anarchy of unfettered nationalism through a world federalism based on universal principles.” Messrs. Neffe and Isaacson both hint that there’s still hope that, one day, Einstein’s valedictory equations might help define a unified-field theory of physics. Fifty years after his death, the prospect that his thirst for peace and understanding will inspire a similar breakthrough on the political front appears far less likely.

Stephen Amidon’s most recent novel is Human Capital (Picador).