Rebuilt, by Michael Chorost, is the story of the author’s own experience with his bionic ear. The cover image is an x-ray of his head, the cochlear implant showing up bright and geometric against the misty, swirling bone of his skull. For someone who watched The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman with great attention and envy as a kid, this story was irresistible. What made the book even more entertaining is that Chorost is only three years older than me and was watching the same shows at about the same age, with the same fascination. It’s like finding out that an old elementary school friend had become bionic, both of us knowing its significance. He knows what it is truly like to be Steve Austin, at least at this point in history.

In fact, Chorost quotes extensively from the book on which The Six Million Dollar Man was based, a book called Cyborg, by Martin Caidin, finding Caidin to be rather prescient on the psychological difficulties of adapting to new, mechanical body parts. He also spends some time in chapter 3 carefully defining the term “cyborg,” which he needs to do in this day and age, when it is broadly overused. A cyborg is not someone with glasses and a cell phone, nor is it the skin-coated robot of The Terminator. It’s a human being with integrated replacement body parts, body parts that make choices on their own and exert some kind of control over the body. Replacement knee and false teeth, no. Pacemaker and cochlear implant, yes. Rather than dilute the term cyborg, he introduces the new term fyborg, for “functional cyborg,” borrowed from Gregory Stock’s book Redesigning Humans, for those of us who wear watches and use sunglasses. Chorost is definitely a cyborg in the original and classic sense.

As he goes from hard-of-hearing to totally deaf, and from there to cybernetic hearing, Chorost discusses the politicization of disability, the deep divides in the deaf community over the issue of whether it is right or wrong to remove deafness. At first blush, it seems like an open-and-shut case. How on earth could you argue in favor of being deaf, when hearing was possible? But Chorost is respectful and understanding of both sides, and shows that the deaf community has a point. If you want some help understanding why, reflect on the recent concern over an amputee sprinter whose prosthetic legs actually give him an advantage. There would be no discussion at all if the sprinter had simply been born with more elastic tendons or muscle fibers that were twitcher than usual. But we react with more alarm when we recognize that the considerable power of engineering can be brought to bear on a person, to not just compensate for a loss but to improve upon it.

It is amazing to read about Chorost’s adaptation to his implant. At first, he only hears noises and cannot make out speech. His brain has to rewire itself to perceive speech again. When he begins to understand words, it happens in an odd space between attention and inattention. If he tries to focus on the words, they sound like nonsense, but if his attention drifts, he realizes that he has been hearing the words. “I was understanding it. Bits and pieces of it, anyway, like seeing the ground through holes in cloud cover.” The subjective experience is that of guessing at what people are saying and being inexplicably correct most of the time.

His ear can also be upgraded, since most of it exists outside of his skull. The software and the microphone can both be changed, and each time they are, his experience of the world changes too, intimately.

One of the most interesting parts of the book is where Chorost grapples with the essay “A Cyborg Manifesto,” by Dana Haraway. He quotes her essay and then footnotes it right at the bottom of page 147, inviting the reader to read the whole essay on the Web. I was reading Rebuilt in physical hardcover form, in a park, but I did have my Kindle with me, so I immediately took him up on his invitation—and found myself suddenly plowing through some extremely dense literary analysis.

This is the kind of stuff for which I ordinarily have a practiced contempt, the kind of postmodern lit-crit babble that Neal Stephenson skewers near the beginning of Cryptonomicon. To my surprise, I found myself understanding about a third of it, definitely picking up what Haraway was throwing down, which raised my hackles and made me worry that maybe the other two-thirds had some substance in it, too. I finished the essay and returned to Rebuilt, turning the page, whereupon Chorost immediately confesses that he, too, isn’t sure about it: “I reread the essay shortly after activation [after his bionic ear was turned on] but found myself unable to decide, once again, whether it was postmodernist bullshit, socialist rant, manic Nietzschean poetry, sly parody, brilliant cultural theory, or (quite possibly) all of the above.” Unexpectedly, Chorost is an admirer of literary theory, having quit the field not because of disdain but inability: “I knew that literary theorists were trying to use language to explore the limitations of language, a staggeringly difficult task, and much of their seeming opacity came from pushing language to its limits to see where it broke down. The collective enterprise was as profound, in its own way, as metamathematics or quantum mechanics. But all I could do was sit on the sidelines and watch the game…my words felt clumsy and amateurish, like I was trying to do surgery with mittens.”

Personally I believe that Chorost is selling himself short there. Rebuilt is both deep and accessible, having a Renaissance man’s interest in all facets of human experience, as well as a solid and practical grasp of the technology involved, including an appendix on the detailed workings of his implant. I highly recommend it.