Competent and always interesting, if a little cursory on some of the heavier mathematics.
Given the example of the great British mathematician and inventor Alan Turing, it’s ironic, writes novelist Leavitt (The Body of Jonah Boyd, 2004, etc.), that the study of mathematics was once thought to cure homosexuality.
Turing expanded upon important ideas of how thinking happens and how machines could be taught to think, and he had a certain inclination toward machine-like literalness himself. A brilliant man who never quite shone, he was always off in the corner, becoming increasingly eccentric and spectacularly unhygienic as he grew older, oblivious to the norms by which others around him lived. Still, Turing found himself at the very heart of the British effort during WWII to crack the German Enigma code. He labored endlessly to decrypt enemy communications, making important discoveries about machine logic in the process. Many of Turing’s contributions to mathematics and nascent computer science date to his years doing top-secret work at Bletchley Park. He might have gone on to greater things had he not been hauled up on the postwar morals charge of “gross indecency with another male: the same crime of which Oscar Wilde had been convicted, and for which he had been sent down, more than fifty years before.” No jail for Turing, though: He instead ate a cyanide-laced apple in homage to a favorite movie, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, a gay martyr who had written of himself, sadly: “Turing believes machines think / Turing lies with men / Therefore machines do not think.”
Competent and always interesting, if a little cursory on some of the heavier mathematics.Pub Date: Nov. 28, 2005
ISBN: 0-393-05236-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2005
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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