Drawing Life: Surviving the Unabomber - Hardcover

Gelernter, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684839121 ISBN 13: 9780684839127

Publisher: Free Press, 1997

Synopsis

A bombing victim examines the benefits to society of acknowledging the Unabomber's evil, and shares the ways in which religion and family have helped him to heal from his experience

About this title

About the Author

David Gelernter is Associate Professor of Computer Science at Yale University.

Reviews

Yale computer scientist Gelernter (1939: The Lost World of the Fair, 1995, etc.) offers a peculiar rant only tangentially about his ordeal as a Unabomber target and the resulting irreparable damage to his right hand and eye. Despite his claim that the bomb that almost killed him, and its aftermath, ``forced me to rething everything I knew about American society,'' it would be difficult to identify an opinion in the book that Gelernter doesn't appear to have held undisturbed for decades, except for his discovery that most reporters are amoral swine. The account of his recovery and newfound celebrity status fills out a thin and entirely unoriginal tract on the ``takeover'' of the American ``elite'' by ``intellectuals'' in the 1960s and the consequent moral degradation of American society that he sees, or reads about, all around him. He doesn't bother to explain who these intellectual masterminds really are (aside from Norman Mailer and Betty Friedan) or what the perverse theories are by which they rule, except for an excessive reverence for ``tolerance.'' Gelernter skips to his main complaint: The ``most disastrous consequence'' of this ``Civil Rights Religion'' is feminism. Tossing off generalizations that disintegrate upon examination (``A lesbian activist gets more respect nowadays than a homemaker''), Gelernter argues that many more women now work because female intellectuals are antagonistic to childrearing and have created a climate in which women are ideologically impelled to get out of the home. This screed is padded with a messy assembly of self-satisfied musings on Gelernter's own artistic sensitivity as poet, painter, and lover of music (punctuated by goofy self-deprecatring asides that define his particular style of false modesty) and, unsurprisingly, on a yearning for a relentlessly idealized 1930s America. Full of solipsism, smugness, and petty arrogance--an exercise in self-regard. (First serial to Time) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

In June 1993, a mail bomb sent by the Unabomber critically injured Yale computer science professor Gelernter (his right hand and eye were permanently damaged). Ostensibly an account of the author's physical and emotional recovery, this book is actually an extended diatribe against the media, the ruling intellectual elite, feminism, and all the other liberal elements that have ruined society. For Gelernter sees the Unabomber's actions as a metaphor for what is wrong with this country. "The blast that injured me was a reenactment of a far bigger one a generation earlier, which destroyed something basic in this society that has yet to be repaired." Unfortunately, any sympathy for Gelernter is quickly dissipated by his heavy-handed and repetitious theorizing. Liberals (if there are any left) will fling this book across the room, while conservatives will simply be bored by the tedious prose. [See also Gelernter's Machine Beauty, reviewed on p. 208.?Ed.]?Wilda Williams, "Library Journal.
-?Wilda Williams, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Free Press
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0684839121
• ISBN 13: 9780684839127
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 159