Like several other volumes published this year invoking the great man's name, Andrew Robinson's large format hardback celebrates the centenary of Albert Einstein's annus mirabilis, 1905, in which he published important papers on Brownian motion, the photoelectric effect and molecular dimensions … and relativity.

Unlike some celebratory titles competing for the reader's hard-won dollar, however, Robinson's book has the endorsement of the Albert Einstein Archives (from which many of its documents and photos are drawn), and a formidable array of contributors, including renowned theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, particle physicist Steven Weinberg, composer Philip Glass and science fiction icon Arthur C. Clarke.

Robinson sets out to create a fully coloured and shaded portrait of Einstein and, initially at least, it's something of a surprise to find that the accelerating lifts, railway carriages and clocks so often found at the heart of the action in books by Einstein or about his work are of diminished importance in this collection of writings.

The book has two parts - "The Physicist" and "The Man" - each with a similar page count. It must be a source of comfort to his biographers that Einstein's life may conveniently be divided into two phases that roughly correspond to these headings: up to about 1925, before which the bulk of his great work was done; and later, when mythology took a greater role and gradually turned Einstein, irrespective of his own wishes, into our defining example of the benign but slightly batty and shaggy-haired scientific genius.

As well as the words of Einstein, his friends and his family, Robinson's book includes contributions from key scientists. Particularly noteworthy among them is I. Bernard Cohen's interview, undertaken at Einstein's Princeton home just weeks before his death. The sketch of Einstein that emerges is as animated, engaging and as passionate as we might hope, shaded with childlike humour and warmth. Indeed, the theme of the book is to add flesh to the bones of cliché and find the basis of the myth.

Of Einstein's work, there is an adequate discussion of both special and general relativity, but more interesting, perhaps, is the effort to correct some of the more common misconceptions about his contribution to quantum theory, and an insight into the project that occupied much of the last three decades of his life, the repeated attempts to lay the foundation of a grand unified theory.

Andrew Robinson's Einstein is an intensely warm and moral man who rose above the great uglinesses of his age to deliver a message of hope to humanity. So far in this century we seem to be short of heroes, so it's nice to rediscover one from the old.