Driving Mr. Albert

: A trip across America with Einstein's Brain by Michael Paterniti

This gem caught my eye because it is a true story and just so strange.
The story is, when Einstein died in 1955, the man who  did the autopsy on him, Thomas Harvey, took Einstein's brain out, took it home and kept it. The author heard this story, contacted him, etc. Anyway, it ends up they are to drive the brain (which floats in pieces in a tupperware) across the country to Einstein's granddaughter. So it is a travelogue, but he wanders off on tangents and talks about Einstein, Dr. Harvey, the controversies with the brain, etc.

Here are just a few good highlights (most of them Einstein quotes):

"According to Einstein, he abandoned the Jewish faith at the age of twelve, when his science training revealed to him that "much in the stories of the Bible could not be true."

"In an instant, Einstein was world-famous. His mysterious smile beamed from the front pages of newspapers around the world - a genius, a guru-mystic who had unlocked the secrets of God's own mind."

(Einstein Reflecting on a friend's death) "Now he has preceded me a little by parting from this strange world. This means nothing. To us believing physicists the distinction between past, present and future has only the significance of a stubborn illusion."

"One of the themes of my earlier life, as I recall it now, is that I was forever projecting myself forward and backward at the same time, negating the present moment, changing my mind with alarming frequency. A master of vicissitudes, I fell in and out of love with certain ideas and certain rock bands and certain girlfriends who, in the end, must have been glad to see me go. After all, I couldn't name my longing, and yet it was there, always driving me away from the place where I stood."

"In photographs near the end of his life...Einstein looks benevolent, mild-mannered, and bemused. As if he's an old man in an oversized child's body, quickly growing out of his ill-fitting clothes and yet still has that pajamas-in-the-morning lightness, a certain gaiety and pokiness in the crinkles crow's feet at his eyes as he smiles."

"Marriage is the unsuccessful attempt to make something lasting out of an incident" Einstein

"FBI files compiled during Einstein's twenty-two-year American sojourn reveal that a slew of federal agents exhaustively followed up on any number of outrageous claims made against Einstein during the 1940s and 1950s.  At various times, agents reported that the great scientist was allegedly building robots that could read the minds of our top military leaders, seriously plotting with the Hollywood glitterati to overthrow the US government, or working as a secret agent for Stalin with plans to emigrate to the Soviet Union."

"(Einstein) 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 their own creation.' "

"Harvey appeared from the darkness with a big cardboard box in his hands. He set it down, and one at a time pulled out two large glass cookie jars full of what looked to be chunks of chicken in a golden broth: Einstein's brain chopped into pieces ranging in size from a turkey neck to a dime. A swirling universe unto itself: galaxies, suns, and planets. It seemed to glow."

"A confession: I want Harvey to sleep. I want him to fall into a deep, blurry, Rip Van Winkle daze, and I want to park the Skylark mother ship and walk around to the trunk and open it. I want Harvey snoring loudly as I unzip the duffel bag and reach my hands inside, and I want to - what? - touch Einstein's brain. I want to touch the brain. Yes, I've admitted it. I want to hold it, coddle it, measure it's weight in my palm, handle some of its one hundred billion now-dormant neurons. Does it feel like tofu, sea urchin, bologna? What, exactly? And what does such a desire make me? One of the legion of relic freaks? Or something worse?
    The more the idea persists in my head, the more towns slip past outside the window as Harvey gazes into the distant living rooms of happy families, the more I wonder what, in fact, I'd be holding if I held the brain. I mean, it's not really Einstein and it's not really a brain, but disconnected pieces of brain, just as the passing farms are not really America but parts of a whole, symbol of the thing itself, which is everything and nothing at once."

(A man named Abrams kept Einstein's eyes) "Now, once or twice a year, when he opens the safe deposit box in a Philadelphia vault where he keeps Einstein's eyes, when he gazes upon two white planets, each set with the most remarkable orb of brown, he's filled with warm memories and a 'deep connection' to the professor."

"On the back seat are some of my books. This is a habit of mine, to bring along monster tomes like Moby Dick or Ulysses but then never so much as crack open one of them."

(Einstein near the end of his life said,) "I am truly a lone traveler and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family with my whole heart...I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude."

"Without the world knowing it yet - let alone the day's leading scientists - Einstein had single-handedly bombed the sacred hall of science, took a sledge to Newton, created a new language for understanding a new universe that seemed intricately and irretrievably different from the one humankind supposed for itself. It was all encoded in arcane equations and seemingly random flights of thought, tangled in scientific jargon that by bit seemed illogical, but added up to something hypersoherent and mind-bending."

"Years later when asked by reporters to explain the theory, Einstein jokingly summed it up like this 'An hour sitting with a pretty girl on a park bench passes like a minute, but a minute sitting on a hot stove seems like an hour.'"

"At that, her eyes flash white, as if a thousand snow-geese of recognition have suddenly taken flight from some hidden lake in her pupil."

"Einstein once noted, 'Americans are collossally bored.'"

In 1922 Einstein toured Japan: "He lectures to packed houses, in one instance speaking through a translator before two thousand people, pontificating for almost six hours on relativity. One theory about Einstein's popularity lay in a bit of confusion: the Japanese characters for 'relativity principal' were quite similar to those for 'love' and 'sex,' and so apparently some felt that a shaggy Tantric guru had landed in their midst.
'
In a 1931 statement to War Resisters International Einstein wrote: "I appeal to all men and women to declare that they will refuse to give any further assistance to war or the preparation to war."
In another letter he wrote: "My pacifism is an instinctive feeling, a feeling that possesses me because the murder of people is disgusting. my attitude is not derived from any intellectual theory but is based on my deepest antipathy to every kind of cruelty and hatred."

Later, in 1952, when questioned about his participation in the war effort and creation of the atomic bomb: "You are mistaken in regarding me as a kind of chieftain of those scientists who abuse science for military purposes. I have never worked in the field of applied science, let alone for the military. I condemn the military mentality of our time just as you do. Indeed, I have been a pacifist all my life and regard Gandhi as the only truly great political figure of our age."