Volume 45, Number 7 · April 23, 1998
Varieties of Madness
By Joan Didion
The Unabomber Manifesto
"FC."
Jolly Roger Press, 90 pp., $9.95 (paper)
A Beautiful Mind
by Sylvia Nasar
Simon and Schuster, 440 pp., $25.00
Drawing Life
by David Gelernter
Free Press, 159 pp., $21.00
In what little we learned of the movements of Theodore Kaczynski before and during the seventeen years of bombings that killed three people and injured twenty-nine and led to the charges on which he will be sentenced in May, there seemed something obstinately, if not recently, familiar, arresting details of place and class and fractured expectations in a curiously earlier American mold, the sketchy outline of a kind of Dreiser character. Here we had the Chicago-born son of the Polish sausagemaker and the mother who dedicated herself to cultivating the apparent early brilliance of her firstborn child: figures from a midwestern Bildungsroman before the world wars. Here we had the sixteen-year-old scholarship student at Harvard (the same novel, at the point in which the yearning son of the prairie West comes up against the lazy entitlement of the East), his cubicle in the service quarters of Eliot House littered with takeout containers of molding coffee while he argued Kant in an all-night cafeteria. Here we had the graduate student at Michigan who worked in a field of calculus so outside the mainstream that he was advised in the interests of a career to abandon it, who stubbornly refused, and who, at the time he received his doctorate and was hired by the mathematics department at Berkeley, was judged by the chairman of that department to be 'probably one of the top twenty to twenty-five PhDs out of eight hundred coming out that year.'
Review, 6827 words
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