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


From Publishers Weekly
Driving a Buick Skylark across the country with an addled octogenarian and an organ may not seem like the ripest material for a story, even if the organ is Albert Einstein's brain. In the hands of a stylish writer like Paterniti, however, the journey becomes a transcendent and hilarious exploration of heady themes like obsession, love and science. In 1955, the octogenarian, a pathologist named Thomas Harvey, removed Einstein's brain during an autopsy and, claiming he wished to study it further, took it home. In the years that followed, he sliced and shipped the brain around the world, but never relinquished most of the organ. Nor, to the criticism of colleagues, did he release his long-promised study. Forty-two years later, Harvey was finally ready to return the brain to Evelyn Einstein, Albert's granddaughter. He enlisted Paterniti, a freelance writer living in Maine, for the task. What ensues is a rare road story that gives equal weight to journey and destination. An expansion of an article published in Harper's magazine, this road-tale bears the classic elements of a spiritual questDthe brain a classic example of a character stand-in. But Paterniti so seamlessly weaves his stream-of-consciousness musings about everything from the theory of relativity to his own sputtering relationship with Harvey that the book becomes much more. Readers will hear echoes from American cultural historyDthe wanderlust of the Beats, the literary texture of Hemingway and the pastel-tinted surrealism of the Simpsons. It's impossible to put this book down. Paterniti has written a work at once entertaining, psychologically rich and emotionally sophisticatedDa feat as rare as, well, Einstein himself. Agent, Sloan Harris. (July) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Adam Goodheart
...simultaneously dead serious and inescapably funny. Reading Driving Mr. Albert is like having breakfast in a roadside diner next to a stranger who starts bending your ear with some far-fetched yarn.


From Booklist
Paterniti, an award-winning journalist, wondered for years if there was any truth to the story that Einstein's brain had been stolen by the pathologist who performed the autopsy. A casual conversation led him to Dr. Thomas Harvey, a "trippy dude" living next door to Williams S. Burroughs. Harvey promptly vanished, then reappeared in Princeton, New Jersey, the scene of the crime. Determined to hear a first-hand account, Paterniti ends up driving Harvey, and pieces of Einstein's brain, to California, and his chronicle of this macabre mission is galvanizing and unexpectedly poetic. Not only does he pilot his enigmatic companion cross-country while the famous brain floats in a Tupperware container, he orchestrates a profoundly revealing journey into our fetishistic feelings about death and the body, the philosophical heart of relativity, the Einstein mystique, and the mysteries of the brain. He also limns empathic portraits of Einstein and Harvey, a peculiar man who unwittingly turned himself into a living reliquary to one of the world's most celebrated and least understood geniuses. Paterniti's unique and haunting tale illuminates our dream of immortality and life's ever-confounding blend of the prosaic and the miraculous. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
"Eccentric, implausible, hilarious, infuriating, and ultimately mesmerizing."
-- The Washington Post Book World

"A splendid peek into the weird side of American life. Driving Mr. Albert is a work of ... uncommon intelligence."
-- Newsweek

"One of the most fascinating and memorable road trips since Kerouac's On the Road."
-- The Denver Post

"Driving Mr. Albert is entertaining, absurd, real, deep and informative ... in a world in which it seems that all the good ideas have been taken, it is singular."
-- The Boston Globe

"Paterniti seems to have been favored by that happy little god of travel writers who sits on one shoulder and whispers ... the perfect anecdotes, the perfect set pieces at the perfect moments. ... It's a brain, in fact, that I'd be happy to travel with again."
-- The New York Times Book Review

FROM OUR EDITORS

A Discover Great New Writers Selection

What happens when a curious young journalist teams up with the pathologist who dissected Einstein's brain? If a drive cross-country in a Buick Skylark isn't the first thing to come to mind, it's just the first of many humorous surprises in Michael Paterniti's winning account of the transporting of this celebrated cerebellum.

Encased protectively in a Tupperware container, Einstein's brain is in the possession of Dr. Thomas Harvey. The now 86-year-old former pathologist, who performed the autopsy on Einstein after his death in 1955, raised the story of the missing organ to near mythic proportions when he secretly removed it for his own scientific study.

Enthralled with the bizarre story of the notorious gray matter, Paterniti sleuths out the location of the elusive pathologist, determined to find out if he is indeed "a grave-robbing thief or a renegade? A sham artist or a shaman?" The friendly but enigmatic Harvey agrees to Paterniti's scheme to chauffeur him from his home in Princeton, New Jersey, to Berkeley, California, where he plans to deliver the brain to Evelyn Einstein, Albert's granddaughter.

Skillfully weaving facts about Einstein with the quirky narrative of this offbeat road trip, Paterniti's own personal journey rises to the surface as he muses over the course of his own life, including a stalled relationship with a girlfriend in Maine. From cheap motels and diners to kitschy museums and roadside attractions, Michael and his reluctant hero, Dr. Harvey, take readers on an entertaining and touching oddball pilgrimage. Driving Mr. Albert is one trip readers won't soon forget.

ANNOTATION

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.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

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.

SYNOPSIS

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.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Driving a Buick Skylark across the country with an addled octogenarian and an organ may not seem like the ripest material for a story, even if the organ is Albert Einstein's brain. In the hands of a stylish writer like Paterniti, however, the journey becomes a transcendent and hilarious exploration of heady themes like obsession, love and science. In 1955, the octogenarian, a pathologist named Thomas Harvey, removed Einstein's brain during an autopsy and, claiming he wished to study it further, took it home. In the years that followed, he sliced and shipped the brain around the world, but never relinquished most of the organ. Nor, to the criticism of colleagues, did he release his long-promised study. Forty-two years later, Harvey was finally ready to return the brain to Evelyn Einstein, Albert's granddaughter. He enlisted Paterniti, a freelance writer living in Maine, for the task. What ensues is a rare road story that gives equal weight to journey and destination. An expansion of an article published in Harper's magazine, this road-tale bears the classic elements of a spiritual quest--the brain a classic example of a character stand-in. But Paterniti so seamlessly weaves his stream-of-consciousness musings about everything from the theory of relativity to his own sputtering relationship with Harvey that the book becomes much more. Readers will hear echoes from American cultural history--the wanderlust of the Beats, the literary texture of Hemingway and the pastel-tinted surrealism of the Simpsons. 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. Agent, Sloan Harris. (July) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Adam Goodheart - The New York Times Book Review

Such a trip might sound at first like an amusing stunt . . . but not exactly promising material for an entire book. . . . Somehow, though, [Paterniti] spun his tale out into a narrative that, perhaps like the wild-haired physicist himself, is simultaneously dead serious and inescapably funny.

Talk Magazine

Part memoir, part travelogue, and part meditation, Paterniti's tale is, as he puts it, stranger than "the devil crapping on a big pile."

Vanessa V. Friedman - Entertainment Weekly

Whether brains or scraps of a rock star's clothing, Paterniti illuminates them, with exceptional skill, as the magical repositories of our dreams and yearnings.

Marlene Adelstein - Time Out New York

Paterniti's lovely prose and sense of humor make it well worth the trip. Read all 6 "From The Critics" >

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