Postcards from the Brain Museum : The Improbable Search for Meaning in the Matter of Famous Minds by Brian Burrell. A fascinating and very readable book about anatomical museums that contain (or once contained) the brains of famous people.

The author travels to Paris, Philadelphia, Moscow, and Tokyo in search of the stories (and sometimes the brains) of people such as Lenin, Einstein, romantic poet Byron, the assassins of James A. Garfield (Charles Guiteau) and William McKinley (Leon Czolgosz), phrenology inventor Franz Josef Gall, mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, surgeon Paul Broca, educator Edouard Séguin, anatomist Burt Green Wilder, and poet Walt Whitman.

Eight pages of archival photos and diagrams accompany the book. This allows the reader to see some glimpses of the famous brain collections as well as the brains of a few lesser known scientists.

Highly recommended.

Read an excerpt of Chapter 1 at Random House.

Read an excerpt about Einstein's brain from npr.org.