"Poignant and savagely funny… Wanjek has pulled off the impossible, a morality tale wrapped up in a prehensible science lesson with, oh yeah, a war parody thrown in for good measure." — Dan Dunn, author of Living Loaded: Tales of Sex, Salvation, and the Pursuit of the Never-Ending Happy Hour Nature versus nurture. What would have become of Albert Einstein had he been raised in any other setting? The CIA didn't think that one through when it set out to clone him... five times. Budget cuts for Project Einstein meant the clones were raised in less-than-ideal environments, from the Bronx to Bartlett, Nebraska. Now, 30 years later, the CIA must round up its lost Einsteins to save the world from an evil genius. The clones, they find, do have one thing in common: They're no Einstein. Author Christopher Wanjek, a Harvard-trained science journalist and international health lecturer as well as a contributing joke writer for The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, is uniquely suited to tell this tale of a genetics experiment gone wrong. Hey, Einstein! is funny science fiction with serious overtones about nature versus nurture, politics and war. The novel combines the scientific acumen of Michael Crichton with the irreverent humor of Hunter S. Thompson into a James Bond-style adventure where good triumphs over evil, more or less, and complex phenomena are intertwined with a cleverly crafted plot.
Hey, Einstein!: A novel about nature and nurture
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
About the Author
Christopher Wanjek is a health and science journalist and author. He gained international notoriety as the health writer with his 2005 book Food at Work, written for the U.N.'s International Labor Organization, about workers' nutrition. The book project, since presented in over 20 countries, has led to laws in several countries to improve workers' access to healthy food. His first book, Bad Medicine, from 2003, continues as a weekly health column for LiveScience.com. As a freelance journalist, Wanjek has written extensively for The Washington Post and Sky & Telescope, as well as Smithsonian, Forbes, and other U.S.- and European-based magazines. His books and magazine articles have been published in seven languages. From 1997 to 2007 he was the senior writer for NASA's Beyond Einstein Program, which focused on general relativity, high-energy astrophysics and the Einstein legacy. Also since 1997, Wanjek has been a contributing joke writer for The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. He is a graduate of Harvard School of Public Health, and he resides in the Washington-metropolitan area with his wife and daughter. Hey, Einstein! is his first novel. Similarity to each of the Einstein clones presented in the novel is purely coincidental.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
By marie
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
This is a quick and fun read with some very touching moments. This is subtitled a nature versus nurture tale and the author takes great pains to show how different these Einsteins are physically and mentally. You can guess the answer from the books description that nurture wins. The first person narrator is preachy but this makes sense in the end. He takes shots at both sides, liberal and conservative. There's a funny parody of NPR being sponsored by Agri-Tech -"At Agri-Tech, we turn corn into food."
There are funny references to Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller Catch-22. The war parody is savage, as one reviewer said. The Rumsfield character, Montjoie, is some kind of mold creature that lives in the White House woodwork and materializes when "humid desperation" it in the room. Then there's the ban on Spanish things, and Congress changes the name of the Spanish fly date rape drug to Liberty Fly. There are many laugh out loud parts easy to miss. My only criticism is the story is script like -like a movie. There is so much clever writing though that the story moves along.
There are funny references to Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller Catch-22. The war parody is savage, as one reviewer said. The Rumsfield character, Montjoie, is some kind of mold creature that lives in the White House woodwork and materializes when "humid desperation" it in the room. Then there's the ban on Spanish things, and Congress changes the name of the Spanish fly date rape drug to Liberty Fly. There are many laugh out loud parts easy to miss. My only criticism is the story is script like -like a movie. There is so much clever writing though that the story moves along.
By Little Louie
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
This is a great idea for a novel with flashes of brilliance but also bouts of mediocrity in the middle. The premise is cloning Albert Einstein. If raised in a different setting, would he still be Einstein? So Wanjek creates five Einstein clones growing up in very very diffrent settings, and none know their Einstein.
He deals a heavy hand in favor of nurture, not nature. It gets a bit preachy as each clone mouths off their conservative or liberal views, with the liberal likely the author's views. The best parts is witty wordplay throughout the book. Listen how he describes a stupid crowd in the opening: "...the muddled class, the collective unconsciousness; theirs not to reason why, theirs but to simply multiply." And there are passages that hit home, like his description of the drug-attic Einstein: "Here was an Einstein drained of marrow, his veins eternally supine to the two-way hypodermic needle of life, pumping in heroin, pumping in junk pills of dubious origin, pumping in decades of physical and mental abuse, all the while sucking out human potential, a perfect conservation of mass and energy."
The beginning and end rock. The end, with the explanation of the narrator, is a total surprise. The middle was a bit drawn out. It's worth the read. The Iraq war parody (the White House can't find the real enemy so they decide to invade Cuba) is hillirious.
by Little Louie "-LL" (South Philly)
He deals a heavy hand in favor of nurture, not nature. It gets a bit preachy as each clone mouths off their conservative or liberal views, with the liberal likely the author's views. The best parts is witty wordplay throughout the book. Listen how he describes a stupid crowd in the opening: "...the muddled class, the collective unconsciousness; theirs not to reason why, theirs but to simply multiply." And there are passages that hit home, like his description of the drug-attic Einstein: "Here was an Einstein drained of marrow, his veins eternally supine to the two-way hypodermic needle of life, pumping in heroin, pumping in junk pills of dubious origin, pumping in decades of physical and mental abuse, all the while sucking out human potential, a perfect conservation of mass and energy."
The beginning and end rock. The end, with the explanation of the narrator, is a total surprise. The middle was a bit drawn out. It's worth the read. The Iraq war parody (the White House can't find the real enemy so they decide to invade Cuba) is hillirious.
by Little Louie "-LL" (South Philly)
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful
By Talia
Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase
The author seems to be too busy making sure we know how clever he is - and by dragging EVERY situation out to its most absurd to actually write a decent story with engaging characters. Considering the size of his cast of characters, you'd think there was SOMEONE to like! But there isn't. Pity perhaps, but no one you can like. I spent most of my time hoping for the "heros" to fail because that was what his universe deserved.
