Shelf Life — Scott Dickensheets: Take a relaxing drive with Einstein’s brain

Friday, June 30, 2000 | 8:51 a.m.

Scott Dickensheets' books and magazines column appears Fridays. Reach him at dickens@vegas.com or 990-2446.

For a journalist, Michael Paterniti is having an MVP season. In May his article from the September 1999 Esquire, "The House That Thurman Munson Built," was a finalist for a National Magazine Award as best feature story of last year. His article in the current Esquire, "The Long Fall of One-Eleven Heavy," an intense, moving piece of journalism about the crash of Swissair Flight 111, is certain to be a candidate next May. And his first book, "Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America With Albert Einstein's Brain" (The Dial Press, $18.95), based on an essay in Harper's Magazine that did win the magazine award (in 1998), is just out and getting pretty good early buzz.

No wonder. Check this premise: When Einstein, the pioneering physicist whose work fundamentally changed our understanding of the universe (and later earned him "Man of the Century" honors from Time), died in Princeton, N.J., in 1955, a pathologist, Dr. Thomas Harvey, conducted the autopsy.

Acting of his own accord -- detractors would later characterize this as "theft" -- he sawed open Einstein's skull and removed the great brain. To study it, he said, and you can sort of see his reasoning: Wouldn't you want to know what set that gray matter -- gray matter that was somehow able to size up reality and the universe in such sui generis terms -- apart from everyone else's? So Harvey took the brain.

Controversy raged, naturally, and Harvey was eventually canned from his job at the hospital. He lapsed into semi-obscurity (newspaper stories popped up about him every so often), taking the brain with him.

Decades later, Paterniti, a bit at loose ends as a writer and fascinated by the legend of The Brain, looked Harvey up. His timing couldn't have been better. It seemed Harvey, now an octogenarian living in New Jersey, had a hankering to take the brain to California, to show it to Einstein's niece. Paterniti offered to drive. An American odyssey was born.

"To be honest," Paterniti writes, "I thought the road trip would be a caper. That's what I imagined. And I thought the old doctor was a true eccentric, which would be entertaining. And yet desire is a tricky thing. It can change a quick outing to the store for milk into a lifelong, shoeless quest through the Himalayas in search of enlightenment. It can put you on the road to Canterbury without your realizing it at first. And some version of that is what happened."

If you look hard enough as you read this slim book (it clocks in at 207 speedy pages), you can see how the original article was expanded into book length. Along with accounts of the pair's road trip adventures -- how weird would it be to drive cross-country with Einstein's brain in Tupperware containers in your trunk? -- Paterniti mixes in biography (Einstein's, Harvey's) and autobiography, detailing the listless period his own life was going through, career-wise and in regard to his longtime girlfriend, author Sara Corbett, who was preoccupied with the writing of her own book.

Harvey is every bit the eccentric Paterniti imagined him to be. Still clinging to his fiction about studying the brain for scientific purposes, even though he long ago lost his medical license -- and he was never a neurologist anyway -- Harvey is a compelling figure of mystery and naivete. Yet one who managed to creep cat-footed across the stage of history. "He's Zelig, a character whose life somehow keeps intersecting with these other, larger lives, playing out on a canvas that encompasses all of history, which, in the end, is really the only thing that makes him compelling. Or does it? Without Einstein's brain would Harvey really just be a harmless old buffer?"

Einstein is a third passenger on this bent trip, his presence palpable, which I guess you'd expect to be the case if you're carrying the guy's brain around. This affords Paterniti ample opportunity to muse on the physicist's myth and meaning, and on our freaky post-Einstein universe: "Einstein would be horrified by our world and its extravagances: the Land of the Free and the Home of the SUVs. The absurdities of our Whopper-sized lives. And perhaps, too, he'd be stunned by the sheer roaring speed and interconnectedness of it." With very few exceptions, this stuff doesn't feel like padding.

Readers of Paterniti's magazine articles know he can bring to journalism a powerful lyrical intensity (one writer confessed to me that the Swissair story brought him to tears). In "Driving Mr. Albert," Paterniti wisely throttles back a little on the poetic license. What makes for a rich magazine-length tale would become thick and hard to chew at book length. Nonetheless, the book's prose retains his trademark flourishes, particularly in the closing pages.

Reading Matters

This probably isn't what our Chamber of Commerce wanted to see in a major-circulation magazine: "Las Vegas is everything ugly and debased in the human race," novelist James Ellroy asserts in a contributor's note in the July GQ. Uh, welcome to fabulous Las Vegas, Mr. Ellroy.

In that issue, he pens a nonfiction piece about Mexican boxers in Las Vegas, breaking down the Erik Morales-Marco Antonio Barrera fight round by round. If you've experienced Ellroy before, you know what you're in for. If you haven't, get ready for seven pages of stop-start reading. Short sentences. Many short, staccato sentences. Some with. Only one. Or two. Words. In them.

In some previous true-crime pieces Ellroy's written for GQ, that rat-a-tat-tat style has worked marvelously. Here it becomes tedious. Very. Quickly.

GQ, by the way, seems to have Las Vegas/Nevada on the brain. In the last six months or so it's published stories on the Binion case, a central Nevada brothel frequented by military pilots and a mini-profile of Piero's restaurant owner Freddy Glusman. Now this. What's next: a chronicle of road-tripping the Strip with Steve Wynn's brain in the trunk?