Dr. Freeman Dyson, a mathematician at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where Einstein worked for 22 years, called it "an unvarnished portrait of Einstein struggling bravely with the manifold inconveniences of sickness and old age."

Comparing himself to an old car that has something wrong everywhere, Einstein complains about his bad memory and the steady parade of visitors — so many that he sometimes pretends to be sick in bed so that he will not have to pose for the obligatory photographs.

But belying Einstein's image as an absent-minded, sockless dustball wandering around in a world of his own, Fantova describes him as a keen and occasionally acerbic follower of current events, who lectured her to pay attention to the news. He was suspicious of Adlai E. Stevenson, whose speeches he found pompous, and referred to another visitor, the Nobel physicist Werner Heisenberg, a founder of quantum mechanics and the leader of Germany's atomic bomb project during World War II, as "a big Nazi." He was openly scornful of the nuclear arms race and the anti-Communist crusade of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy.

Reading at one point that McCarthy suspected subversion on his own committee, Einstein remarked that it was getting to be like the French Revolution: "Whoever hangs the other person first wins.'