Sunday, October 16, 2011

the last book I ever read (The Mirage Man) (again)


from The Mirage Man: Bruce Ivins, the Anthrax Attacks, and America's Rush to War by David Willman:

Two of the books Ivins kept in his bedroom described men whose lives had faint echoes of his own lost promise. Arrowsmith, the 1925 novel by Sinclair Lewis, depicts the rise from a small town in the Midwest of a scientifically gifted man who achieves acclaim as a bubonic plague researcher but is buffeted by the temptations of recognition and power. Ivins, who aspired to Mensa, might also have related to the protagonists of A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines. Janna Levin's 2006 novel chronicles the anguished lives of Kurt Gödel, the storied mathematical logician (whose work is examined in Gödel, Escher, Bach, the book that would provide a key to the mystery of the anthrax letters), and Alan Turing, who helped break the German military code during World War II and whose "universal Turing machine" was the archetype for the modern computer. The deaths of both were self-inflicted--Gödel, by intentional starvation due to his paranoia over being poisoned; Turing, by eating a cyanide-laced apple.

No comments:

Post a Comment