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THE MAN WHO INVENTED THE COMPUTER

THE BIOGRAPHY OF JOHN ATANASOFF, DIGITAL PIONEER

Engrossing. Smiley takes science history and injects it with a touch of noir and an exciting clash of vanities.

Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Smiley (Private Life, 2010, etc.) looks at the curious personalities and tortured paths that led to the first computer(s).

As in her novels, the author displays a talent for keeping a dozen fully realized characters on stage. While John Atanasoff is certainly a likely candidate for “the man who invented the computer,” plenty of strange, captivating people were concurrently at play in the same field. “The story of the invention of the computer,” writes Smiley, “is a story of how a general need is met by idiosyncratic minds, a story of how a thing that exists is a thing that could have easily existed in another way, or, indeed, not existed at all.” But it did exist, and in permutations galore, the brainchildren of a host of atypical men: geniuses, cranks, the impossibly remote, the backroom dealer. The author provides vivid characterizations of each: Atanasoff, enterprising, hardworking and so highly directed that he could have been an Asperger’s candidate; Alan Turing, a computer visionary who couldn’t build a birdhouse; Konrad Zuse, a German reduced to scavenging pieces of material for his machine from the bombed-out streets of Berlin “without getting shot for looting”; John von Neumann, who contributed important architectural features to computer design and whose upper-class connections allowed him great freedom. Smiley captures the men in their evolving milieus—at universities and in war rooms and business offices—and notes that they sometimes came into contact. One example was the meeting between Atanasoff and John Mauchly, another computer designer, a brief encounter in which Atanasoff revealed the workings of his machine, and ultimately led to the patent case that was found in Atanasoff’s favor as the inventor of the first “automatic electronic digital computer for solving large systems of simultaneous linear equations.”

Engrossing. Smiley takes science history and injects it with a touch of noir and an exciting clash of vanities.

Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2010

ISBN: 978-0-385-52713-2

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2010

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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INTO THE WILD

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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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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