$17.00
ISBN: 9780385333030
Availability: Special Order
Published: Dial Press Trade Paperback - June 5th, 2001
Michael Paterniti's Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain is a thoroughly engaging composite of road trip, shaggy dog story, riff on Albert Einstein's life and theories, memoir, and more, with some characters that seem to have escaped from a David Lynch movie. Paterniti, a magazine journalist, tools across the country in a rented Buick Skylark with two passengers. One is Dr. Thomas Stolz Harvey, the 84-year old retired pathologist who performed the autopsy on Einstein in 1955 in Princeton, New Jersey. Harvey removed the great scientist's brain, hoping to discover the secret of his genius, and took it home with him. Although he has shared parts of it with other researchers through the years, most of it, floating in formaldehyde in a Tupperware bowl, is Paterniti's second passenger, safely ensconced in a dufflebag in the Skylark's trunk. The point of the trip is to show the brain to Einstein's bemused granddaughter Evelyn, who lives in Berkeley, California. In Lawrence, Kansas, they visit a dying William S. Burroughs, a former neighbor of Harvey's, where the two old geezers hold a Mad Tea Party-like conversation. Stopping at roadside attractions along the way, Paterniti and Harvey reminisce, philosophize, and often talk at cross purposes. Paterniti sorts out his complicated personal life while Harvey considers the future of their other passenger, addresses a class of high school students in San Jose, and shows the brain to a pair of Paterniti's good friends, all the while refusing to let his chauffeur take a gander. In less sure hands this book would fall flat, but Paterniti's ability to make sense of its random parts, his intelligence, appreciation of the absurd, curiosity, writing talent, and wit make it a delight. ~ Reviewed by Louise Jones
