Brown, Brandon R., Professor of Physics, University of San Francisco, — Planck: driven by vision, broken by war.

NY, Oxford Univ Press, (2015). 1st ptg. VG in VG DJ. Credited with being the father of quantum theory with his work described by his close friend Albert Einstein as "the basis of. all twentieth-century physics." He was a German physicist working during the first half of the 20th century, his library, personal journals, notebooks, and letters were all destroyed with his home in WWII. What remains other than his contributions to science are handwritten letters in German shorthand and tributes from other scientists of the time. Author Brown interweaves the voices and writings of Planck, his family, and his contemporaries with many passages appearing in English for the first time to create a portrait of a groundbreaking physicist working in the midst of war. Planck spent most of his adult life grappling with the identity crisis of being an influential German with ideas counter to his government. During the later part of his life, he survived bombings and battlefields, surgeries and blood transfusions, all the while performing his influential work amidst a violent and stumbling Nazi bureaucracy.