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T A B L E+T A L K

Noxious Nietzsche: Bash him or defend him in the "What makes him so great?" discussion in the Books department of Table Talk.

W A N D E R L U S T

Esther Dyson, Road Warrior
By Don George
The Net's most frequent flyer shares her travel secrets
(11/04/97)

R E C E N T L Y

RELEASE 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age
By Esther Dyson
Nonfiction
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Speaking Truth to Power
By Anita Hill
Nonfiction
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Blues up and Down
By Tom Piazza
Nonfiction
(10/31/97)

BLUE: The Murder of Jazz
By Eric Nisenson
Nonfiction
(10/31/97)

The Art of the Comeback
By Donald Trump
Nonfiction
(10/30/97)

Memoirs of a Geisha
By Arthur Golden
Nonfiction
(10/29/97)

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159 PAGES

BY PHIL LEGGIERE | Computer science luminaries don't often moonlight, as David Gelernter has, as painters, composers and literary essayists. Even less often do they publish skeptical critiques of the cult of cyber-technologies, as Gelernter, a leading figure among artificial intelligence researchers, did in his 1991 book "Mirror Worlds." Which makes it especially ironic that Gelernter, in June 1993, found himself the target of a mail-bomb attack by the Unabomber, an attack that blew off most of his right hand and badly damaged his hearing and eyesight.

"Drawing Life" is Gelernter's memoir of this tragedy, and of his life since the bombing. It's a curious work, part gutsy account of his survival and recovery from this trauma, part cantankerous rant against almost everything Gelernter dislikes in the contemporary world -- from teenage pregnancy rates to automatic transmissions. At his best, in his accounts of his hospital stay, his homecoming, his physical therapy and his eventual return to writing and teaching, Gelernter memorably renders the slow, painful process of physical and spiritual mending. He provides many vivid, stoically humorous recollections of his ordeals, such as the following description of regaining consciousness after one of many operations: "There was a breathing tube in my mouth, so I couldn't talk, and I was moored with a dozen lines like a rocket fueling for blast off." Eschewing self-pity and what he calls " the cult of victimology," Gelernter also simply and powerfully evokes both the distress of physical dependence and the positive role music, books, faith, memory and family support played in his recovery.

As moving and morally instructive as Gelernter can be, however, another Gelernter, this one a surpassingly simplistic conservative ideologue, is given to interrupting the narrative with interminable indictments of the "liberal elite" who he believes created the Unabomber. "The blast that injured me was a reenactment of a far greater one a generation earlier in the 1960s," he declares. He's fixated on the thesis that the counterculture represented the "takeover" of American leadership by "intellectuals" (a term left undefined), which paved the way for fanatics like the Unabomber. It's a thesis he asserts endlessly, with a melodramatic intensity that would have made the late Allan Bloom ("The Closing of the American Mind") blush.

If anybody has earned the right to vent, Gelernter has. But in giving such undue historical weight to his attacker -- a character who by all indications is a solitary lunatic fringer's lunatic fringer -- Gelernter ultimately adds to, rather than transcends, "the cult of victimology" he decries. He also detracts from his narrative's genuine stylistic achievements.
SALON | Nov. 5, 1997

Phil Leggiere is a writer who lives in Hoboken, N.J.