Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain
by Michael Paterniti
The Dial Press, 2000
Reviewed by William I. Lengeman III
It could be the ultimate road trip/buddy movie - a man and the aging and slightly dotty pathologist who removed Albert Einstein's brain take it (floating in formaldehyde in a Tupperware container) on a cross-country jaunt. In reality, it's hard to know what's more unbelievable, that it really happened or that Hollywood hasn't latched onto the story yet.
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The Air Conditioned Nightmare
by Henry Miller
New Directions, 1970
Reviewed by William I. Lengeman III
One almost has to admire the sheer vitriol with which reviewer Orville Prescott savaged Henry Miller in the New York Times, in late 1945. Though he admitted that his subject was "not without talent," Prescott ultimately concluded that The Air-Conditioned Nightmare was "as shallow, snobbish, uninformed, pretentious and monstrously egocentric a book as ever I read in my life."
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American Odyssey: A Book Selling Travelogue
by Len Fulton, with Ellen Ferber
Dustbooks, 1975
Reviewed by William I. Lengeman III
Most road trip books have at their heart some type of quest, though many of these can be rather nebulous. For Len Fulton and Ellen Ferber, the goal of the road trip that spawned American Odyssey was very straightforward - to sell Fulton's novel, The Grassman, and to raise awareness of small press publishing, in general.
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