A moving and fascinating account of a brilliant man who failed in spite of his best efforts.
An account by London Science Museum director Swade (Charles Babbage and His Calculating Machine, not reviewed) of the work and influence of 19th-century English mathematician and inventor who was the first to proclaim the need for computers and describe their basic features.
Computing is not the same as calculating. Cumbersome mechanical calculators, capable of performing fairly impressive mathematical operations, had existed for centuries. They could not, however, perform millions of such operations—although, by the 19th century, this was precisely what was required. Many professions routinely used entire volumes filled with nothing but calculations: navigational, astronomical, logarithmic, or chemical tables. Each calculation in these massive references had been performed by hand and, inevitably, errors crept in. More errors then appeared during transcribing and typesetting. It was maddening. When Babbage proposed an immense machine that could be programmed to calculate and print continually, almost everyone liked the idea, and the British government contributed a huge (for the time) sum of money for the research and development of the scheme. Babbage spent much of his own fortune and invested decades in the research, design, toil, quarrels, and personal disasters that produced sheaves of drawings and piles of parts but no complete machine. Eventually the government stopped contributing, and Babbage died a bitter man. The author has the expertise necessary to understand his subject’s ideas and, after telling the story, he asks the obvious question: Would the machines have worked? The answer comes in the final chapters, which describe a six-year effort to construct one of Babbage’s designs in time for the bicentennial of his birth in 1991. In man-hours, frustration, and sheer financial cost, the enterprise duplicated Babbage’s torments almost exactly, with one exception: The machine was built. And it worked.
A moving and fascinating account of a brilliant man who failed in spite of his best efforts.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2001
ISBN: 0-670-91020-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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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