Synopsis
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
Reviews
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.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
First-novelist Gitlin draws on his expertise as media critic and recent historian (Vertical Hold, 1983; The Sixties, 1987) to produce this tough-talking, savvy, but finally wearying thriller- -featuring an aging blond TV correspondent, the Sixties icon who radicalized her, and their frantic search for the man who murdered Einstein. Her Filofax crammed with commitments for televised interviews with rock stars, on-screen tˆte-a-tˆtes with elder statesmen, and live wrap-ups on her own TV news-magazine show, In Depth, burnt-out reporter Margo Ross can barely keep her eyes open, much less remember the wild and political 60's life she left behind. Nevertheless, she's not surprised to hear the voice of Sixties novelist Harry Kramer, her hero and mentor back when she was just a gofer on a New York underground rag, growling about a possible conspiracy over her office telephone in 1992. Kramer, whose own career is on a downhill slide, has uncovered evidence that Albert Einstein was murdered, on his deathbed, with an overdose of speed. Who would want to kill the most brilliant man of our century--even if he was a pacifist and it was 1955--particularly when he was near death anyway? Hungry for hard news, Ross joins Kramer in tracking down the answer among Einstein's former colleagues at the Institute for Advanced Physics, at the New York home of Einstein's hawkish nemesis, Gustav Janousek, in old newspaper reports on Einstein's developing Unified Field Theory, and at the Lower East Side apartment of Norman Gottehrer, an aging crank who as a youth basked in the light of Einstein's kind attention. Running against an impossible deadline and forced to fight for control of her story with a ratings-obsessed boss and the network's mega-mogul owner-- who may be trying to protect some highly placed friends--Margo is run too ragged to realize who the real evildoer is. The conclusion comes as a satisfying surprise--though by then readers may be too exhausted by Ross's frantic, end-of-the-millennium lifestyle to care. A clever story, told at hyper-speed. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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