Driving Mr Albert - Softcover

Paterniti, Michael

3.34

2,570 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 034911241X ISBN 13: 9780349112411

Publisher: Abacus, 2002

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This extraordinary travel book tells the true story of how in 1997 writer Michael Paterniti agreed to take a road trip from New Jersey to California, reuniting the preserved brain of the great scientist Albert Einstein (1879-1955) with his granddaughter Evelyn. Paterniti's improbable travelling companion is 84-year-old Thomas Harvey, the pathologist who not only removed Einstein's brain from his head during the autopsy but purloined it from Princeton Hospital also! Storing the great scientist's brain in Tupperware zipped inside a grey duffel-bag, they rent a Buick Skylark, and drive from New Jersey to Ohio, Kansas City to Dodge City, Los Alamos to Las Vegas, finally achieving their bizarre reunion in Berkeley, California. A singular journey - and a unique book.

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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 faithful around the world.

The brain itself has seen better days, its chicken-coloured 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, genius or just lucky? Harvey guards the brain as if it were his own. From time to time, he has given certain favoured specialists a slice or two to analyse, but the results have been decidedly mixed. Physiologically, Einstein's brain may not have been any 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 15 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 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

Review:

It's impossible to put this book down. Paterniti has written a work at once entertaining, psychologically rich and emotionally sophisticated - a feat as rare as, well, Einstein himself (PUBLISHERS WEEKLY)

masterfully observed, surreal exchanges. (DAILY MAIL)

Michael Paterniti has more talent than he knows what to do with... DRIVING MR ALBERT gleams with good phrases. (SUNDAY HERALD)

Peterniti cuts through the country's heart like a laser beam...illuminating the complex formula that is the USA. (INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY)

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