Cheap shots at Merton, Mack
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IT WAS odd and unsettling to turn to the last page of g on June 2 and find Alex Beam issuing a full-throated and ill-informed snark about two people who have deeply influenced my life, one indirectly and one directly.
To say that Thomas Merton was "electrocuted in his bath" - Beam's first example of "brilliant unconventional intellects whose lives ended in a blinding flash of stupidity" - is inaccurate. Merton, while lecturing in Thailand, touched a miswired electrical fan after bathing and received a fatal shock.
I am not privy to the details of the inquest following Dr. John Mack's death, but it is shameful to use any pedestrian's horrible traffic fatality to make a rhetorical, comedic point ("failed to look to his right when crossing the road during a visit to right-hand-drive London").
My life intersected with Mack's years before his later, unconventional interests. No matter what one might make of his later work investigating alien abductions, he was a brilliant, compassionate, and skilled psychoanalyst and physician, a committed anti-nuclear activist, and a brilliant writer who does not deserve to be blithely disrespected for cheap literary gain.
Dr. Paula Tatarunis
Waltham 
