What do you think?
Rate this book
The Murder of Albert Einstein: A Novel
A glitzy TV news anchor gets involved in a search for Albert Einstein's killer after her mentor, a cult novelist and connoisseur of conspiracy, tips her off to the alleged crime that occurred forty years earlier
297 pages, Hardcover
First published September 1, 1992
6 people want to read
About the author
Todd Gitlin
49 books51 followersTodd Gitlin was an American writer, sociologist, communications scholar, novelist, poet, and not very private intellectual. He was professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
June 5, 2009
The inside cover reckoned this book was "extremely funny". I think they should have read a dictionary before reading this as a) the dictionary would be funnier and b) they'd understand the definition of funny.
As the book deals with Einstein, it does get tough going at times.
As the book deals with Einstein, it does get tough going at times.
February 5, 2022
so bad, it's good
---
Publishers Weekly
Hard-boiled, sarcastic Margo Ross, producer-reporter for a 60 Minutes -like TV news program, gets a tip from her ex-mentor, radical-chic novelist Harry Kramer, that high levels of amphetamine in the preserved brain of Albert Einstein indicate the physicist's death was a murder. The great pacifist socialist Jewish scientist, in this entertaining debut novel, had many enemies, including ex-Nazis, a hippie philosopher-poet who visited him on his deathbed, a courtly Viennese mathematician who knew him at Princeton and a sharp-tongued Czech physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project and later pushed for America to nuke Vietnam. As Margo and Harry, who become lovers, plunge into investigating a possible crime hushed up for 37 years, Gitlin, a Berkeley professor and well-known social critic ( Inside Prime Time ; The Sixties ), serves up biting commentary on how television frames and decontextualizes reality to fit its format. He also provides an unusual perspective on the century that spawned the Bomb, technologically engineered genocide and modern physics' search for a grand unified theory. The story doesn't quite come off, however, either as a thriller, a novel of ideas or a satire of TV, and the anticlimactic, improbable ending leaves the reader feeling frustrated.
---
Publishers Weekly
Hard-boiled, sarcastic Margo Ross, producer-reporter for a 60 Minutes -like TV news program, gets a tip from her ex-mentor, radical-chic novelist Harry Kramer, that high levels of amphetamine in the preserved brain of Albert Einstein indicate the physicist's death was a murder. The great pacifist socialist Jewish scientist, in this entertaining debut novel, had many enemies, including ex-Nazis, a hippie philosopher-poet who visited him on his deathbed, a courtly Viennese mathematician who knew him at Princeton and a sharp-tongued Czech physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project and later pushed for America to nuke Vietnam. As Margo and Harry, who become lovers, plunge into investigating a possible crime hushed up for 37 years, Gitlin, a Berkeley professor and well-known social critic ( Inside Prime Time ; The Sixties ), serves up biting commentary on how television frames and decontextualizes reality to fit its format. He also provides an unusual perspective on the century that spawned the Bomb, technologically engineered genocide and modern physics' search for a grand unified theory. The story doesn't quite come off, however, either as a thriller, a novel of ideas or a satire of TV, and the anticlimactic, improbable ending leaves the reader feeling frustrated.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews