One of America's preeminent biographers offers the closest thing we have to the definitive biography of Albert Einstein. The content is rich and the prose is clear, though (warning!) the book weighs in at a massive 700+ pages.
Bodanis offers a rich but accessible exploration of Einstein's famous equation, E=mc2. Bodanis explains the mind-bending concepts of Einstein's work by situating them within the broader historical, scientific, and biographical contexts of Einstein's life. The book, an effective work of both popular history and popular science, reaches out effectively to a non-scientific audience.
Einstein himself attempts to explain his famous concepts to a general audience in this 1916 tract. We'll let you be the judge of whether his explanation really is one "anyone can understand."
Albert Einstein may have been quoted (and misquoted) as often as any human being of the twentieth century. Einstein's sayings (not to mention sayings that have been falsely attributed to Einstein) still crop up on t-shirts, bumper stickers, and email sig files even today. The New Quotable Einstein is the definitive source for the sayings of one of our most quotable historical figures. The book's innovative structure—quotes are grouped thematically—provides a kind of shadow biography of the man.
When Albert Einstein died in 1955, the doctor who performed his autopsy decided to remove the great thinker's brain so that future scientists could study it to determine the source of Einstein's intelligence. It's been preserved in formaldehyde in a glass jar ever since. This book is the slightly bizarre story of a cross-country road trip taken by the author, the elderly doctor who performed Einstein's autopsy, and Einstein's brain itself. (The brain rode in the trunk, in Tupperware.)