In the week of February 4th, 1982, biologist, baseball fanatic, and wit Stephen Jay Gould published a warm, funny review of Martin Gardner's Science: Good, Bad, and Bogus in the outsized weekly called The New York Review of Books. The review was about many things. It was about the even distribution of bad science and woo across all economic classes. It was about the thanklessness of the job of being a public defender of reason. It was about Martin Gardner's prose style. It was about creationism. One of the things it was not about, as it happens, was Uri Geller. Nevertheless, Uri Geller responded with a letter to the editor.
He did so this week, in the issue of October 14th, 2010, nearly thirty years after the publication of the article in question. Both the article's subject and author are dead.
Geller claims he did this because “Mr. Gould's review was subsequently featured on your website, perhaps as a tribute to the late Martin Gardner.” (As of this writing, the review is confined to the site's 1982 archives, along with every other article published that year. It requires a subscription to view those archives, but you may find an anthologized version of Gould's essay here.)
Geller writes:
“For many years Martin Gardner published articles and books that were critical of me and of what I do. To the best of my recollection although I may on occasion have picked up the phone to my lawyers, I never responded to his attacks, having always believed […] that a good debate is better than no debate...”
I submit that a refusal to comment upon criticism is hardly the stuff of “good debate,” nor is the enjoining of such a scuffle only after one side is deceased.
Geller claims that he is not “in any was culpable as alleged by Mr. Gould.” What Mr. Gould alleged, simply, was that Mr. Geller used standard conjuring tricks in his spoon-bending act. Geller's outright denial of such an allegation is a rather stronger statement than we've come to expect from the “mystifier,” who in recent years has tended dodged questions of his powers' efficacy. Ambiguity, apparently, is more “mysterious” than honest-to-goodness magic.
Geller writes:
“In future perhaps you could urge your reviewers to choose their words more carefully. Perhaps you could also ensure that contributions to your website are edited to a higher standard. I would lastly suggest that a better tribute could have been made to Mr. Gardner, who was a great mathematician and whose passing was noted by me with sadness. As for Stephen Jay Gould my limited knowledge of him would suggest that he was an inventive and productive scholar in the fields of biological and geological sciences and I hope that he will be remembered as such.”
No worries, Uri. He will be.
This note needn't drag on. As Gould wrote in his review, “I must add the Catch 22 of Gardner's art: victory renders the specific subject irrelevant. Yesterday's seer is today's bore. Who cares about Uri Geller since we all know (I trust) that he is a skilled conman and a mediocre magician. Geller once is a good reminder; Geller by the dozen begins to wear.” Before that happens, let me add that there is no reason for Geller to be concerned with an old article in the New York Review of Books that deals with him only tangentially. Far nastier things have been said about Geller far more publicly, and his career has continued amain. And let me add, too, that I cannot help but take the conciliatory tone of Geller's note as a belated attempt to seem bigger than men who dwarfed him in life.