Books, Arts & Manners: Deco Chamber

Machine Beauty: Elegance and the Heart of Technology, by David Gelernter (Basic Books, 166 pp., $20)

DAVID Gelernter cares more passionately about everything than most of us do about anything. Such is the catholicity of his concerns that nothing escapes for long the bear-hug of his conviction, not even things that the rest of us accept with relative passivity. You know he means it when he asserts that “today’s TV comedy [is] less funny than Sid Caesar’s in the 1950s,” that Frank Lloyd Wright was “the greatest architect of the century,” and that “Liquor brings out the worst in us. TV does too, and so do computers.”

JG

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James Gardner

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Machine Beauty: Elegance and the Heart of Technology, by David Gelernter (Basic Books, 166 pp., $20)

DAVID Gelernter cares more passionately about everything than most of us do about anything. Such is the catholicity of his concerns that nothing escapes for long the bear-hug of his conviction, not even things that the rest of us accept with relative passivity. You know he means it when he asserts that “today’s TV comedy [is] less funny than Sid Caesar’s in the 1950s,” that Frank Lloyd Wright was “the greatest architect of the century,” and that “Liquor brings out the worst in us. TV does too, and so do computers.”