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Driving Mr. Albert

Michael Paterniti

2000211 pagesabout 3–5 hours
2000
first published
  • 2000Dial Press · 211 pages · ENGISBN 9780385333009
  • 2000G.K. Hall · 307 pages · ENGISBN 9780783892986
  • 2001Delta · 211 pages · ENGISBN 9780385333030
  • 2002Abacus · 224 pagesISBN 9780349112411
  • 2003Tandem Library · ENGISBN 9780613656535
  • 2016Brilliance AudioISBN 9781531885540

"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."--BOOK JACKET.

How it reads

ComplexityLayered

When and where

Reading situationTravel
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