SOURCE: A review of The Gutenberg Elegies, in The Bloomsbury Review, Vol. 15, No. 1, January-February, 1995, pp. 3, 8.

In the following review, Rehder praises Birkerts's powers of persuasion in The Gutenberg Elegies, heeding the emphasis on the personal aspect of his thought.

Second only to sex, the human mind seems concerned about books. Both can be all-consuming, and their decline has been seen as a sure sign that Western culture is coming to an end. What the nether areas of pornography are to sex, the new media of TV, hypertext, CDs, and the Internet are to books. According to Sven Birkerts, they are "masturbation aids" for the mind, except that these outcroppings of high technology don't make us think dirty thoughts; they just get us thinking. They also get Sven Birkerts writing, and what terrific writing it is! Yet it won't do just to call Birkerts a stylist of the highest...