Review by Choice Review
Described by the publisher as an "independent historian," Dyson is a good storyteller and a thought-provoking author. Chapters in this book recount tales from czarist Russia's expedition to Alaska, US warfare against Native Americans, use and culture surrounding kayaks, early digital computers, and many other historical vignettes intertwined with autobiographical sketches of growing up in the rarified atmosphere of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, studying and building kayaks, and choosing to live in a tree house. What ties these disparate narratives into something unified, fascinating, and deep is Dyson's uncanny ability to see (and to persuade readers of) profound recurring themes. Among these are the potential abuse of new technologies for control and destruction, Dyson's perception of a prevailing under-appreciation of the subtle effects of evolved technologies, the inherent limitations of digital as opposed to analog approaches, and the possibility of a future dominated by technologies not directly controlled by humans. Everyone should have a friend like George Dyson--he brings wonder and fresh perspectives and connections to every part of life and human history. This delightful, beautifully written book is suitable for a very wide range of readers. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers. --David Bantz, University of Alaska
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Anecdotal gleanings from the history of technology, and a family history inseparable from monumental advances in physics and mathematics, inspire an unconventional meditation on information systems and the limits of humankind. Dyson (Turing's Cathedral, 2012) offers vivid, if impressionistic, accounts of the nautical exploration of Beringia and the Native American genocide. A narrative about Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study and the Manhattan Project becomes his segue into the story of his parents: his set-theory mathematician mother, Verena Huber, and his father, Freeman Dyson, whose work defined modern particle physics. The author shares his iconoclastic background: dropping out of high school to hike around Colorado; living without electricity in a tree house; an abiding interest in sea-kayaking. His thesis, which peeks and darts throughout, is that information-processing systems are part of nature, and that the human-built digital computer will ultimately merge with the larger, messier, and smarter analogue system that is nature itself. The result is less a scientific argument than a digressive, cerebral attempt to make peace with the smallness of humanity, considered against the backdrop of infinity.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A pleasingly eccentric, impossibly wide-ranging tech treatise/memoir. Dyson, an independent historian of technology and son of noted physicist Freeman and brother of tech maven Esther, opens his account of the arc of technology with Gottfried Leibniz, who, after vying with Isaac Newton to invent calculus, took a commission from Peter the Great of Russia that had several elements: one, to mount an expedition to Siberia, find out if and where Asia meets North America, and claim some land; two, to found a Russian academy of sciences to jump-start scholarship there; and three, to use computers to build "a rational society based on science, logic, and machine intelligence." Thus the opening of one of the four ages, by Dyson's count, of technology, another of which we're just entering, one inaugurated when "machines began taking the side of nature, and nature began taking the side of the machines." Racing from the Stone Age to the coming singularity, Dyson is in fine fettle. Leibniz figures, but so does the author's beloved kayak-building hobby. So, too, does the Apache warrior Geronimo, who occasioned the development of a technology that prefigures the modern age of communicating devices--from heliograph to iPhone, that is, and in mighty leaps of prose (but never logic). "Nothing is to be gained by resisting the advance of the discrete-state machines," Dyson memorably writes, "for the ghosts of the continuum will soon return, when the grass is eight inches high in the spring." With luck, the machines will tolerate us, for the culminating point in Dyson's lively, if deeply strange, narrative is that the intelligence of tomorrow will not be human alone but will be shared with machines and nature (plants and animals and microbes and such) in time to come, fulfilling Leibniz's dream. A thoughtful--and most thought-provoking--exploration of where our inventions have taken and will take us. (32 pages of b/w illustrations; 15 b/w chapter-opening illustrations) Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
