Overview
A skillful, literate (New York Times Book Review) biography of the persecuted genius who helped create the modern computer To solve one of the great mathematical problems of his day, Alan Turing proposed an imaginary computer. Then, attempting to break a Nazi code during World War II, he successfully designed and built one, thus ensuring the Allied victory. Turing became a champion of artificial intelligence, but his work was cut short. As an openly gay man at a time when homosexuality was illegal in England, he was convicted and forced to undergo a humiliating treatment that may have led to his suicide. With a novelist's sensitivity, David Leavitt portrays Turing in all his humanity-his eccentricities, his brilliance, his fatal candor-and elegantly explains his work and its implications.
Full Product Details
Author: David Leavitt ,
Paul Michael Garcia
Publisher: Blackstone Audiobooks
Imprint: Blackstone Audiobooks
Dimensions:
Width: 16.30cm
, Height: 3.00cm
, Length: 15.50cm
Weight: 0.295kg
ISBN: 9781483018386
ISBN 10: 1483018385
Publication Date: 01 June 2014
Audience:
General/trade
,
General
Format: Audio
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Available To Order
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Reviews
Engaging...Leavitt's signal accomplishment is a comprehensible explanation of the mathematical abstractions in Turing's seminal papers...On the biography side, Leavitt reveals a perceptive understanding of Turing's personality, one more sophisticated than the common view of Turing as a martyr to homophobia. -- Booklist With lyrical prose and great compassion, Leavitt has produced a simple book about a complex man involved in an almost unfathomable task that is accessible to any reader. -- Publishers Weekly [Leavitt] conveys abstruse information in elegant narrative prose. -- Miami (FL) Herald Ambitious...Stimulating. -- Seattle Times Skillful, literate. -- New York Times Book Review
Author Information
David Leavitt's many books include the story collection Family Dancing, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the novels The Lost Language of Cranes, While England Sleeps, The Body of Jonah Boyd, and The Indian Clerk, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and short-listed for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Leavitt is also the author of the nonfiction works The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer and Florence, A Delicate Case. His writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Harper's, Vogue, and the Paris Review. He lives in Gainesville, Florida, where he is professor of English at the University of Florida and edits the literary magazine Subtropics. Paul Michael Garcia, an AudioFile Earphones Award winner and former company member of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, received his classical training in theater from Southern Oregon University, where he worked as an actor, director, and designer.
