Didion Bombs

FOR a literary magazine, The New York Review of Books has a curiously intimate relationship with bombs. In the Sixties, it published on its cover a diagram on the construction and ingredients of a Molotov cocktail. (Roger Kimball tells us in his droll New Criterion account of how TNYRB helped to make Sixties radicalism chic that David Levine, its resident and brilliant caricaturist, responsibly refused to draw the device.) Other New York Review contributors at that time apparently had a closer acquaintance with explosive substances. Tom Hayden, for instance, reported from Newark that in the riots there “many missiles were thrown at cars driven by whites, but not often with murderous intent;” and again of whites that “very few, if any, were shot at.”

That was thirty years ago, of course, and a lot of blood has flowed under the bridge since then, some of it belonging to David Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale, who suffered severe injuries when a bomb sent to him by Theodore Kaczynski, the so-called Unabomber, exploded in his hands. Mr. Gelernter has since published Drawing Life, an account of his recovery from those injuries interspersed with reflections on why modern America has seemingly lost the capacity to condemn such wickedness in simple moral terms. And, in turn, many people naturally felt curious as to how TNYRB would handle this incendiary document.

About the Author

John O’Sullivan

John O’Sullivan is a senior fellow at National Review Institute and a contributing editor of National Review.

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FOR a literary magazine, The New York Review of Books has a curiously intimate relationship with bombs. In the Sixties, it published on its cover a diagram on the construction and ingredients of a Molotov cocktail. (Roger Kimball tells us in his droll New Criterion account of how TNYRB helped to make Sixties radicalism chic that David Levine, its resident and brilliant caricaturist, responsibly refused to draw the device.) Other New York Review contributors at that time apparently had a closer acquaintance with explosive substances. Tom Hayden, for instance, reported from Newark that in the riots there “many missiles were thrown at cars driven by whites, but not often with murderous intent;” and again of whites that “very few, if any, were shot at.”

That was thirty years ago, of course, and a lot of blood has flowed under the bridge since then, some of it belonging to David Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale, who suffered severe injuries when a bomb sent to him by Theodore Kaczynski, the so-called Unabomber, exploded in his hands. Mr. Gelernter has since published Drawing Life, an account of his recovery from those injuries interspersed with reflections on why modern America has seemingly lost the capacity to condemn such wickedness in simple moral terms. And, in turn, many people naturally felt curious as to how TNYRB would handle this incendiary document.