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Summary and Reviews of Driving Mr Albert by Michael Paterniti

Driving Mr Albert by Michael Paterniti

Driving Mr Albert

A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain

by Michael Paterniti
  • Critics' Consensus (2):
  • Readers' Rating (2):
  • First Published:
  • Jul 1, 2000, 224 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Jun 2001, 224 pages
  • Rate this book

About This Book

Book Summary

Part travelogue, part memoir, part history, part biography, and part meditation - one of the most unique road trips in modern literature.

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 eighty-four-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.

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. With the brain as both cargo and talisman, Paterniti perceives every motel, truck-stop diner, and roadside attraction as a weigh station for the American dream in the wake of the scientist's mind-blowing legacy. Finally, inspired by the man who gave a skeptical world a glimpse of its cosmic origins, this extraordinary writer weaves his own unified field theory of time, love, and the power to believe, once again, in eternity.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

Vanity Fair
Part travelogue, part biography ... highly absorbing.

Washington Post Book World
Of all our distinctively American manias, few have the enduring psychic resonance of the road trip. From Lewis and Clark to Huck Finn, Jack Kerouac to Hunter Thompson, it is our favorite route to regeneration and self-discovery, our autotherapeutic ritual, our hajj without a Mecca. Now feature writer Michael Paterniti joins that grand tradition with an eccentric, implausible, hilarious, infuriating, and ultimately mesmerizing nonfiction account of his eight-day journey across the country in a teal-colored Buick Skylark.... [the book's] huge appeal and final joy depend chiefly on two elements. One is Paterniti's prose style ... The other is the refreshingly compassionate tone.

Author Blurb Bob Shacochis, author of Easy in the Islands and The Immaculate Invasion
We all need to sign up for this one, the last great postmodern fin de millennium road trip, a cosmic whodunit and an everlastingly unforgettable pilgrimage. Driving Mr. Albert is a dazzling dense lump of miracles and genius thanks in no small part to chief detective Michael Paterniti, a literary wizard whose multidimensional prose is quite a match for his subject's brilliance.

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Read-Alikes

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