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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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
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