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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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