Taking a close look at Einstein's work (which that book as a whole does a great job of) shows that certainly, Einstein was surrounded by the tools necessary to do the job (Lorentz, Reimann, Minkowski), some dating back decades... and yet, he is the one who actually used them correctly. It obviously was not an "obvious" synthesis, and in the end I do not think we can come to any other conclusion than that Einstein still did something genuinely important and interesting. It simply wasn't in the vacuum that the popular understanding has it to be, but that's hardly surprising.
Einstein wasn't the guy perspiring in the laboratory doing the hard experiments, like, say, Bohr. I think he was the first to admit this. But he was a superlative connector of dots. Another example of dot-connecting was Watson and Crick, who used the tactic to "steal" the Nobel, after Rosalind Franklin's exacting hard work in the lab had laid the perfect foundation. In the case of Einstein, at least, lightening kept striking again and again. He's a great inspiration to everyone that would rather work smart than hard.
What about all the others, namely Planck? Mach? Doppler? The geologists doing seismology int the era (namely, same university)?
It was the spirit of the times (zeitgeist), for which he successfully claimed credit for through tedious propaganda (the old guard deceased with time, which also helped "new physics" to emerge)
I am at a loss as to how you seem to have read my first sentence, which named names of people who created various tools, as another claim that Einstein invented this all on his own.
It was not the spirit of the times. The spirit of the times was still grappling with some sort of absolute reference frame. If it was the "spirit of the times" it would have been discovered about 20 years earlier. It wasn't.
All Einstein did was apply the Pythagoras theorem properly to the problem, changing it a bit to properly fit the problem. He found that the correct formula was actually quite simple, differing only by a sign from Pythagoras' theorem.
And so Plato was right. "God geometrizes continually"
Taking a close look at Einstein's work (which that book as a whole does a great job of) shows that certainly, Einstein was surrounded by the tools necessary to do the job (Lorentz, Reimann, Minkowski), some dating back decades... and yet, he is the one who actually used them correctly. It obviously was not an "obvious" synthesis, and in the end I do not think we can come to any other conclusion than that Einstein still did something genuinely important and interesting. It simply wasn't in the vacuum that the popular understanding has it to be, but that's hardly surprising.