Michael Paterniti: Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America With Einstein's Brain

It began as an urban legend, a macabre slice of Americana too goofy and absurd to be true: The brain of Albert Einstein, the physicist whose name has come to be synonymous with "genius" in the cultural lexicon, was stolen by the hospital pathologist who performed his autopsy and now resides in a jar hidden somewhere within the man's ranch home in New Jersey. But on a tip from a landlord, author Michael Paterniti was led to an eccentric octogenarian named Dr. Thomas Harvey, the thief who had mysteriously snatched the "huge, rough pearl" from Einstein's cranium at the expense of his career and professional reputation. The legend was expanded into a cute anecdote when Paterniti detailed his journey across America with Harvey and the brain as a bizarre human-interest story for Harper's, an article which earned him a National Magazine Award. But now that the cute anecdote has been stretched even further into a full-scale, 200-page reminiscence, how much gray matter is really left to pick over? The answer is not very much. But Paterniti, an engaging essayist with an active imagination and a sharp eye for the American landscape, constructs a smoke-and-mirrors treatise that works in spite of itself. The ostensible purpose of Driving Mr. Albert is to document a road trip the author took with Harvey from Princeton to Berkeley, with Einstein's ravaged brain floating in Tupperware containers in the trunk of their rented Buick Skylark. Other than a few interesting detours, most notably an impromptu visit with a hammered William S. Burroughs—for some reason, the Beat legend insists on referring to Harvey as "Dr. Senegal"—precious little happens along the way. And Harvey himself, though still adamant about how he's used (or, in the opinions of many, misused) the brain for scientific purposes, makes a quiet and inscrutable subject, his thoughts drifting like the "y" in his colloquial "way-ell." For much of the way, Paterniti is left to his own literary devices, relaying a fascinating history of Einstein's science and celebrity and waxing poetic about how the modern world would process through such a great mind. Whether having Einstein's brain in the trunk of a car "rearranges the way you see everything" or is merely a writerly trick becomes moot as Driving Mr. Albert cuts its insistent path across the country. In Paterniti's capable hands, the trip is illuminating and worthwhile, no matter how shaky a premise for taking it.