Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein’s Brain by Michael Paterniti (PDF)

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.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: 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 the Inside Flap 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. From the Back Cover 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. About the Author Michael Paterniti won the 1998 National Magazine Award for his article “Driving Mr. Albert,” which was first published in Harper’s Magazine. A former executive editor of Outside, his work has appeared in Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine, Details, and Esquire, where he is writer-at-large. He lives in Portland, Maine, with his wife and son. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. On a cold winter day, during one of my early visits to Dr. Harvey, we drove around Princeton, making the obligatory pilgrimage to 112 Mercer Street, the house where Einstein spent the last twenty years of his life. We sat for awhile with the car running, warm air pouring from the heater, gazing at a modest wood-frame colonial with black shutters on a pleasant block of like houses. More than anything, Einstein said he loved the old place for the light that filled the upstairs rooms and for the gardens out back. He kept pictures of Michaelangelo and Schopenhauer hanging in his study, because, as he said, both men had escaped an everyday life of raw monotony and taken “refuge in a world crowded with images of our own creation.”Sitting in the car, Thomas Harvey recalled hoew the Einstein family gathered here after the scientist’s death, how his son, Hans Albert, and Einstein’s longtime assistant, Helen Dukas, and Einstein’s executor, Otto Nathan, as well as a small group of intimates, drove to a secret spot along the Delaware and scattered the ashes that remained of Albert Einstein’s body, And that was it.Not surprsingly, however, controversy immediately enshrouded the removal of Einstein’s brain. Word was leaked by Harvey’s former teacher Dr. Zimmerman that Harvey had Einstein’s brain, and that he, Zimmerman, was expecting to receive it from his student. When this was reported in The New York Times a day after Einstein’s death, Hans Albert, who knew nothing of his father’s brain having been removed, was flabbergasted. Otto Nathan expressed regret and shock, and later implied that Harvey was a bald-faced thief. But, according to Harvey, Nathan, who died in 1984, stood by the door of the morgue, watching the entire autopsy. (Nathan would later claim he didn’t know what Harvey was up to.)Meanwhile, Harvey announced in a press conference that he was planning to conduct medical research on the brain. He says he spoke to Hans Albert over the phone, assuring him the brain would be studied for its scientific value, which would then be reported in a medical journal, thus allaying one of the deepest fears of the Einstein family: that the brain would becom a pop-cultural gewgaw. “My one regret is that I didn’t come to Mercer Street and talk to Hans Albert in person,” Harvey told me that day. “You know, clear things up before it got out of hand.”But things were already out of hand. Zimmerman, then on staff at New York’s Montefiore Medical Center, prepared for the delivery of Einstein’s brain, but it never arrived. Increasingly flummoxed, then angry and embarrassed, Zimmerman found out that Princeton Hospital, under the direction of a man named John Kauffman, had decided not to relinquish it. “Hospitals Tiff over Brain of Einstein,” read one 1955 headline, and went on to describe how the brain remained at “the center of a jurisdictional dispute,” with Princeton Hospital standing its ground, like an old-time gunfighter, claiming “the brain wouldn’t be taken out of town.”But then, a few years after the autopsy, Harvey was fired from his job for allegedly refusing to give up Einstein’s brain to Kauffman. In fact, Harvey had kept the brain himself, not at the hospital, but at home, and when he left Princeton he simply took it with him. Years passed. There were no studies or findings. And, in turn, no legal action was brought against Harvey, as there was no precedence in the courts for the recovery of a brain under such circumstances. And then Harvey fell off the radar screen. When he gave an occasional interview — in local newspaper articles from 1956 and 1979 and 1988 — he always repeated that he was about “a year from finishing study on the specimen.”Four decades later, there’s still no study. And because somewhere in his watery blue eyes, his genial stumble-footing, and that ineffable cloak of hunched integrity that falls over the old, I find myself feeling for him and can’t bring myself to ask the essential questions: Is he a grave-robbing thief or a renegade? A sham or a shaman? Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐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 the autopsy, Dr. Thomas Harvey, took the brain for himself. He did it without the permission of the family, but when it was discovered, the family allowed him to keep the brain provided that any results were to be published in scientific journals. Harvey rationalized his actions by saying that he wanted to research the brain to discover the key to Einstein’s brilliance. Unfortunately, Harvey was not a neurologist and didn’t really have the knowledge to perform a proper study of any brain, let alone Einstein’s. He gave out parcels of the brain to various scientists, but until many decades after Einstein’s death, nothing definitive was able to be determined. In the meantime, Harvey switched jobs, moved around the country, and all the while, he kept Einstein’s brain with him.A young writer, Michael Paterniti, became fascinated by the story of the brain and befriended Thomas Harvey when the doctor was 85 years old. Harvey mentioned that he’d like to travel to California to meet Evelyn Einstein, Einstein’s step-granddaughter. So Paterniti volunteered to be his chauffeur, and they set out from New Jersey with pieces of Einstein’s brain in tow. The main story is not the destination but the things that happen along the way. Some of the stops (like Los Alamos) have ties to Einstein, while others (Las Vegas) do not. Throughout the journey, Dr. Harvey remains almost as much of a mystery as the brain. Not only does he not reveal any secrets, but he is also reluctant to show the brain to Paterniti. Paterniti hopes for a glimpse of the brain–perhaps when Harvey falls asleep. He writes “I want to touch the brain. Yes, I’ve admitted it. I want to hold it, coddle it, measure its weight in my palm…Does it feel like tofu, sea urchin, bologna? What exactly? And what does that desire make me? One of the legion of relic freaks?”Driving Mr. Albert is a great compliment to Isaacson’s more serious and in-depth biography. Paterniti writes that “having Einstein’s brain in the trunk rearranges the way you see everything.” Reading Mr. Paterniti will rearrange the way you perceive Albert Einstein.

⭐Interesting book combining a kind of memoir with a history lesson regarding Albert Einstein’s life prior to the autopsy where the crux of the book starts. That alternation makes the book a better read, less boring and the writing is good. By now it is a bit dated since it took place sometime in the late ’80s, early 90s but still well worth the read. And it was a fun read too.

⭐While I enjoyed the trip across the United States with these two characters and the unusual characters they met along the way the book never seemed to feel completely unified. Perhaps that is what the author wanted but I always felt like the three characters in the story—the author, the doctor and the brain—never connected fully. Still an enjoyable read with all kinds of insights into the life of Albert Einstein to research.

⭐A fascinating and unique read! Many passages were so well-written that I actually squealed, and I consider myself to be a reasonably good writer/reader. My only criticism is that a few times the driving got a little slow, as driving does. But the original plot and engaging characters more than made up for that. I’d highly recommend this book to people who appreciate bizarre plots and characters, which, I’m sure, includes any fan of Mr. Albert Einstein.

⭐Informative and well-written little gem of a book. I had just finished reading Walter Isaacson’s biography on Einstein so this short book by Michael Paterniti was a quirky follow-up about what became of Einstein’s brain after his death. I had known nothing about this topic beforehand, but enjoyed Mr. Paterniti’s interweaving of his own personal story, pertinent references to Einstein’s life and works, and the introduction of the pathologist who performed Einstein’s autopsy and then kept the brain for reasons of his own.

⭐I read this because it was our book group selection and finished it as a point of pride; I’ve always finished my book group book. But I wouldn’t have. It really bothered me to read it. It wasn’t the subject matter, or that the narrator was incredibly self centered. It was because the writer abused both the language and reality. I reached a point where I couldn’t ignore it; it really bothered me.There are many examples, but I’ll limit this to a few samples. The word ‘trolling’ is used as a substitute for both walking – ‘strolling along’ – and a policeman ‘patrolling’. Harvey is called a ‘harmless old buffer’; I guess he meant ‘duffer’ – which didn’t fit either. ‘Einstein has been imprinted on us as a genius’. Are we baby ducks? Snow? A sign is painted on the ‘hull’ of a van.Some misrepresentations of fact include ‘American fighter jets attacked Osaka’; not fighters – bombers and not jets – because we didn’t have any during WWII. A black crow follows them for some distance as they cruise down the interstate. Fast crow. He names a few stars shining overhead in winter including Vega, which happens to be a summer star and would be on the other side of the planet. How about the ‘last dopamine rays of the sun’? Enough said. I don’t mean to be so pedantic, but words matter. And it really bothered me.

⭐Our hero Michael, is at a cross road in his professional and love life. What better way to settle your thinking than to offer to drive the kidnapper of Einstein’s brain, held hostage for forty years and only a chopped up set of remnants of its former self, across country in a rented blue Skylark. Nothing. And it works for Michael, and readers will be happy to know that Albert’s tattered brain does find a suitable home. Sorry drags a bit when Paterniti tries to find meaning in it all. What meaning in folly?

⭐A good book which I kept thinking “I wish it were better”. This is an amazing story which kept my attention​, but something is missing and I cannot put my finger on it. I wanted to tell the story my way, which, with a great author, you should never have that feeling.

⭐Ok

⭐The book i was expected reached me properly.. The quality was good… Printing was excellent… Great bookk….

⭐言わずと知れた天才の周辺事情が読めます。が！わたしは読後、アインシュタインに対する気持ちが変わりました。ちょっと、幻滅しました。理系で彼を「神」と崇めない人はいない、と思う。そういう人にはおススメしません。が！理系の彼らは純粋に彼の頭脳を崇拝してるのであって、品行方正かどうかとか、人としての生き様とか、そんなの関係ねえ！ですもんね。

⭐

⭐愉快に読み進みました。アインシュタインの脳とアメリカ横断の旅なんて！私も参加したかったです。稀有な脳を取り巻く人たちのさまざまな思惑と苦悩、そしてアメリカで生涯を終えたアインシュタインの脳をめぐる本人の意思を度外視した喜劇とも思える「その後の扱い」に切なさを感じると共に彼に魅せられた人たちの狂気を感じました。アインシュタインが「遺したもの」・・・は一体何だったんだろう？今までに体験したことのない読後感でした。翻訳者の訳も非常に軽快で、翻訳であることを全く感じずに読み進むことができました。

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