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1939: The Lost World of the Fair, by David Gelernter
- Abstract
David Gelernter is a polymath: a professor at Yale who specializes in the theory of artificial intelligence, a software designer, a painter, a classical composer, an author. Two summers ago, in the first of these capacities, he was the victim of a letter bomb from the Unabomber that left him with massive eye, hand, and internal injuries from which he is still recovering. Gelernter is also of a religious cast of mind: the grandson of a rabbi, he attended a yeshiva in Manhattan in the late 1970′s, and took his B.A. at Yale in religious studies.
All of Gelernter’s enthusiasms are visible in everything he does and writes, and 1939: The Lost World of the Fair is no exception, being three discrete books braided into one. The first is a history of the 1939 World’s Fair; the second a religious meditation on what separates the optimistic world view of “high-30′s” culture from our own; the third a harrowing semi-fictional love story.
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