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September 11, 2020

George Ernsberger - Columnist
Posted 9/11/20

ANALOGIA: THE EMERGENCE OF TECHNOLOGY BEYOND PROGRAMMABLE CONTROL by George Dyson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Okay, so the title is nearly meaningless, and the subtitle might scare you teeth-clenching …

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September 11, 2020

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ANALOGIA: THE EMERGENCE OF TECHNOLOGY BEYOND PROGRAMMABLE CONTROL by George Dyson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Okay, so the title is nearly meaningless, and the subtitle might scare you teeth-clenching silly. But this really lovely, meditative history of technology as the center of civilized life brings us to a (reasonably) safe landing after an exhilarating flight. It's one of those serious-popular world histories the column favors so much—this one a history of technology, rather than our usual favorite, art history. Some of this book's readers will begin it already knowing that binary mathematical reasoning was known to Leibniz in the 1700s; but I, a dabbler, learned it here. The point being, if a dabbler is to be trusted in the matter, that the moment of “beyond programmable control” could come, like, next week. Unless it's already here; we won't know, will we, until some machine tugs our sleeve? Anyway, I wasn't kidding about it being lovely. This Dyson (a famous name in mathematics and nuclear physics, but that's his father) writes beautifully; this is a book for dabblers, rather than scientists, though the best of them will love it, too.

ATOMIC LOVE by Jenny Fields (Putnam). Quite romantic, sexy, but smart and also beautifully written, a historical romance with espionage. And scientists, convincingly brainy and complicated. A romance for our times, set in an earlier time but alert to women's frustrations in the world, then as much as now.

THE LESS DEAD by Denise Mina (Mulholland/Little, Brown). Mina is a master of serious crime fiction and a writer especially for those—not only women—who have no patience for what's ladylike in women's fiction. She gives us here a standalone novel (she also runs a couple of series) about sex workers that finds complex humanity throughout that world, and characters to admire and to identify with. And suspense, and some terror. And a really memorable read. As always.

HENRY KISSINGER AND AMERICAN POWER by Thomas A. Schwartz (Hill & Wang). A big book about a big guy—a great man, in fact, and worth understanding whether we approve of him and his works and schemes and world-reordering accomplishments or not. It's subtitled A Political Biography, and that's apt; it isn't electoral politics that's the subject, but international relations, which are and must be managed either by a form of politics or a form of warfare. And the politics of the matter are as dependent on hard choices between greater and lesser goods and evils as the electoral politics we're all so uncertainly furious about, day to day, these days. The book is clear in the writing and the thinking. The conclusions are unavoidably tortuous, head-spinning. In an enlarging way, whether they're fun or not.

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