Skip to main content

Driving Mr. Albert

A Trip across America with Einstein's Brain
ISBN: 0641585330
Format: Paperback, Non-fiction
Pub. Date: May 2004

Albert Einstein's brain floats in formaldehyde in a Tupperware bowl in a gray duffel bag in the trunk of a Buick Skylark barreling across America. Driving the car is Michael Paterniti, a young journalist from Maine. Sitting next to him is an 84-year-old pathologist named Thomas Harvey who performed the autopsy on Einstein in 1955 -- and simply removed the brain and took it home. And kept it for over forty years.

Paterniti is driving Harvey and the brain from New Jersey to California, where Harvey will show it to Einstein's granddaughter, Evelyn, and also display it to a group of high school students. Driving Mr. Albert is a map of their ten day adventure. With the brain as both cargo and talisman, Paterniti perceives every hotel, truckstop diner, and casino as a weigh station for the American dream in the wake of the scientist's mind-blowing legacy.

Billboards, T-shirts, self-appointed Einstein fanatics all become the grist for this dazzling young writer's assessments of Einstein's life and work, as well as the nature of celebrity, relics, and America itself. Finally, inspired by the man who gave a skeptical world a glimpse of its cosmic origins, Paterniti weaves his own unified field theory of time, love, and the power to believe, once again, in eternity.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

New York Post Online Edition

news : "December 29, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Startling new Army statistics show that strife-torn Baghdad - considered the most dangerous city in the world - now has a lower murder rate than New York. The newest numbers, released by the Army's 1st Infantry Division, reveal that over the past three months, murders and other crimes in Baghdad are decreasing dramatically and that in the month of October, there were fewer murders per capita there than the Big Apple, Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. The Bush administration and outside experts are touting these new figures as a sign that, eight months after the fall of Saddam Hussein, major progress is starting to be made in the oft-criticized effort by the United States and coalition partners to restore order and rebuild Iraq. 'If these numbers are accurate, they show that the systems we put in place four months ago to develop a police force based on the principles of a free and democratic society are starting to ...
Post a Comment
Read more
Post a Comment
Read more
Forum: The fish that threatened national security : "At La Guardia we proceeded to security and the X-ray inspection point run by the Transportation Security Administration. I have learned by now that, post-9/11, a traveler is better off safe than sorry when proceeding through security. I wasn't prepared, however, for the TSA to stop me right at the entrance, proclaiming that no small pets, including fish, were permitted through security. I had, however, just received the blessing of the ticket agents at US Airways and pre-assured MJ's travels with Pittsburgh International Airport security weeks before our travel date. I tried to explain this to the screener who stood between me and the gates, but she would have none of it. I was led back to the US Airways ticket counter, stocking-footed and alone, where the agents reasserted that they did not see a problem for me to have a fish on board, properly packaged in plastic fish bag and secured with a rubber band as MJ was....
Post a Comment
Read more