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by: Michael Paterniti
List Price: $10.95Amazon.com's Price: $8.76 You Save: $2.19 (20%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 616.07092
EAN: 9780385333030
ISBN: 038533303X
Label: Dial Press
Manufacturer: Dial Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 224
Publication Date: June 05, 2001
Publisher: Dial Press
Release Date: June 05, 2001
Sales Rank: 87424
Studio: Dial Press
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
Albert Einstein's brain floats in a Tupperware bowl in a gray duffel bag in the trunk of a Buick Skylark barreling across America. Driving the car is journalist Michael Paterniti. Sitting next to him is an eighty-four-year-old pathologist named Thomas Harvey, who performed the autopsy on Einstein in 1955 -- then simply removed the brain and took it home. And kept it for over forty years.
On a cold February day, the two men and the brain leave New Jersey and light out on I-70 for sunny California, where Einstein's perplexed granddaughter, Evelyn, awaits. And riding along as the imaginary fourth passenger is Einstein himself, an id-driven genius, the original galactic slacker with his head in the stars. Part travelogue, part memoir, part history, part biography, and part meditation, Driving Mr. Albert is one of the most unique road trips in modern literature.
Amazon.com Review:
Driving Mr. Albert chronicles the adventures of an unlikely threesome--a freelance writer, an elderly pathologist, and Albert Einstein's brain--on a cross-country expedition intended to set the story of this specimen-cum-relic straight once and for all.
After Thomas Harvey performed Einstein's autopsy in 1955, he made off with the key body part. His claims that he was studying the specimen and would publish his findings never bore fruit, and the doctor fell from grace. The brain, though, became the subject of many an urban legend, and Harvey was transformed into a modern Robin Hood, having snatched neurological riches from the establishment and distributed them piecemeal to the curious and the faithful around the world.
The brain itself has seen better days, its chicken-colored chunks floating in a smelly, yellow, formaldehyde broth, yet its beatific presence in the book, riding serenely in the trunk of a Buick Skylark, encased in Tupperware, reflects the uncertainty of Einstein's life. Was he a sinner or a saint, a genius or just lucky? Harvey guards the brain as if it were his own. From time to time, he has given favored specialists a slice or two to analyze, but the results have been mixed. Physiologically, Einstein's brain may have been no different from anyone else's, but plenty of people would like the brain to be more than it is, including Paterniti:
I want to touch the brain. Yes, I've admitted it. I want to hold it, coddle it, measure its weight in my palm, handle some of its fifteen billion now-dormant neurons. Does it feel like tofu, sea urchin, bologna? What, exactly? And what does such a desire make me? One of a legion of relic freaks? Or something worse?
Traversing America with Harvey and his sacred specimen, Paterniti seems to be awaiting enlightenment, much as Einstein did in his last days. But just as the great scientist failed to come up with a unifying theory, Paterniti's chronicle dissolves at times into overly sincere efforts to find importance where there may be none, and it walks a fine line between postmodern detachment and wide-eyed wonderment. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, the book offers an engrossing portrait of postatomic America from what may be the ultimate late-20th-century road trip. --Therese Littleton
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - AS A WRITER...
...I must report with envy that I had to keep inturrupting the story to comment on how very much I was enjoying the writing. I rank this craftsman on a level with Charlie Pellegrino and David Guterson. I also publish and edit and I'm a wrtiting coach so I don't have a lot of read time these days, but this is one writer I brake for. The odd characters pop right off the page and run around the room and get you to thinking, "but don't I know this guy?"...and make you realize that they are living people ... Read More
Rating: - A fresh story and a unique style
I first picked up this book about three years ago, but with so little time to read, it just sat on my overcrowded bookshelf. I always joke to friends that I am a Book Buyer, not a Book Reader, and as a result my shelves are full of interesting tales just waiting for my life to slow down a bit so I can enjoy them.
I regret that I let this one sit idle for so long!
As a writer myself, I always appreciate a fresh story, and it has been a long time since I read a book that was this ... Read More
Rating:  - Oddball travelogue...
In Walter Isaacson's new biography, Einstein: His Life and Universe, he recommends Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain by Michael Paterniti. This book is filled with interesting facts, great observations, but above all, it's a fun read. Driving Mr. Albert reminds me of the oddball travelogues I've come to enjoy written by Tony Horwitz (Confederates in the Attic, Blue Latitudes, etc.).
When Einstein died in Princeton Hospital in 1955, the pathologist who performed ... Read More
Rating: - A Buick Skylark named Desire
As Paterniti remarks in the prologue to the book, "Desire is a tricky thing." It can make even the most mundane activity the first step in a journey of unimaginable unraveling discovery, or it can just simply prolong the mundane. When a stalled career and a dissolving romantic situation left the author in a state of malaise and boredom, he was willing to try anything just to break the stagnation. What better cure, when the opportunity bizarrely presented itslef, than to take a cross country drive with the ... Read More
Rating: - It's not really a travelogue
This book is first of all a research project of Albert Einstein and second a biography of Mr Harvey who saved Albert's brain for over 40 years. Then it's a memoir and philosophical rant of the author's feelings toward his girfriend Sara. The travel came in fourth as a backdrop to all of the above. Still, it's a very good read with a unique angle.
The book is well-written and well researched but at times during the read the author jumps from present to future or even the past and throws the reader ... Read More
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