ANOTHER SIDE OF GENIUS : `EINSTEIN' LOOKS AT MAN BEHIND THE IMAGE.

Byline: Willard St. John Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire

Title: ``Einstein: A Life''

Author: Denis Brian

Data: 512 pages, John Wiley & Sons; $30

Our rating: Four Stars

Albert Einstein so loved to sail that he refused to use his boat's motor even when he was becalmed for hours.

He smoked more than he admitted to his wife.

He always buttoned just one button on his overcoat. His second wife, Elsa, claimed that he had been willing to dress formally for his first wife, but not for her.

On the walls of his Princeton study, Einstein hung portraits of Mahatma Gandhi, James Clerk Maxwell and Michael Faraday.

Einstein created the first scientific revolution of the 20th century, relativity, but he never believed in the second, quantum mechanics.

Author Denis Brian's ``Einstein: A Life'' does much to reveal the man behind the image that has been synonymous with the word ``genius'' for most of the 20th century. Readers seeking an explanation of his brilliance will not find it here, but those seeking to know why the public found him fascinating will.

Drawing on letters to and from Einstein, on interviews with colleagues and contemporaries, Brian has painted an intimate portrait of the famous man's personal life. Though Einstein died in 1955, much of the record of his private life had remained hidden by his executors until the 1980s. Brian's is the first balanced account published since most of his papers were made public (some material remains under lock and key even today).

Brian traces Einstein's journey from impertinent schoolboy through rebellious youth, struggling academic, respected physicist to icon of genius.

Along the way we learn of Einstein's clumsy breaking off with his first love, of his affair with and later marriage to fellow student Mileva Maric, of their out-of-wedlock daughter who vanished from the record shortly after her birth in 1902. This daughter remains a mystery; letters of this time between her parents are missing. When in 1936 a woman claimed to be his daughter, Einstein used a detective to prove she was a fraud. Clearly he had not even kept track of the girl he had fathered; in fact, he seems never to have seen her.

Even his relationships with the two boys he and Mileva had after their marriage were difficult. The elder regarded his father as distant and unfeeling; the younger seemingly begged for his father's attention. Neither boy got much of it, for they returned with their mother to Zurich in 1914, not long after Einstein became director of the new Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Berlin. The elder, Hans Albert, became a respected engineer; the younger, Eduard, showed early signs of mental instability and spent most of his adult life institutionalized.

Einstein secured a divorce from Mileva in 1918 by promising her the cash award from the Nobel Prize he expected to win - he had been nominated six times in the previous eight years. (When he won the prize in 1922 - not for relativity but for explaining how light can knock electrons out of metals - Mileva did get the cash.)

Einstein's move from prominent physicist to public genius began in 1919, when a solar eclipse allowed England's Sir Arthur Eddington to prove that Einstein's relativity theory correctly predicted that light from the stars bends as it passes the sun. The drama of this prediction caught the imagination of the media of the time, much as the Hubble Space Telescope has intrigued today's public.

At about the same time, Einstein became active in supporting the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, raising again his public profile. One secret that Brian fails to reveal is how Einstein, who acknowledged no religion, was convinced to adopt the Zionist cause. The book's explanation, in its entirety, is that a Zionist friend ``got Einstein to change his mind by `making me conscious of my Jewish soul.' '' His starring role in a fund-raising tour of the United States helped make Einstein's name a household word on both sides of the Atlantic. Ever after, his scientific reputation and his relaxed personal affability, so in contrast with the stiff demeanor of traditional European scientists, made his views sought by the press worldwide.

When Adolf Hitler soon characterized Einstein as the epitome of Jewish conspiracy against ordinary Germans, Einstein's safety was endangered but his renown enhanced outside Hitler's reach. The wild-haired professor soon became identified not only with science and Zionism but also with peace and humanitarianism.

By the early 1930s, Einstein's second wife, Elsa, and his secretary-housekeeper, Helen Dukas, had to build a wall of interference around the great man to protect his privacy. Eventually, life in Germany became too dangerous, and Einstein came to America to stay in 1933. Once installed at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, he remained until his death in 1955 as the sage of modern science.

During his time in the United States, Einstein broke with his ideals of peace to urge development of the atomic bomb, for fear that Germany would make one first and so win World War II. Even so, the FBI conducted a years-long investigation, suspicious of Einstein's bent toward peace in times of international tension.

Most of his scientific energy from the '30s onward was devoted to unsuccessful attempts to work out what today is called the Theory of Everything, a single set of ideas that would explain how the universe works.

At the time, many physicists thought Einstein was wasting his time looking for an impossibility; but today one of the most dynamic fields within physics is the renewed search for such a theory.

Though hundreds of books have been written about Einstein, Brian's intimate work proves that in literature, as in science, taking a careful second look can be a rewarding endeavor.

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Photo: Readers seeking an explanation of Albert Einstein'sbrilliance will not find it in ``Einstein: A Life.'' Those seeking to know why the public found him fascinating will. He is shown here in Palm Springs in 1934.