My Amazon Review of Ananyo Bhattacharya's "The Man From the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann"

 

Genius

 

Something was in the water in fin de siècle Budapest. Out of that community came Nobel Laureates in physics Edward Teller, Eugene Wigner and Leo Szilard, the rocket pioneer Theodore von Karman, and the subject of Ananyo Bhattacharya biography John von Neumann. I would note that the book is more a biography of von Neumann’s ideas rather than a full biography of his life.

 

Von Neumann was born into a very upper-middle class Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary in 1903. He was a child prodigy from the beginning and received his math Ph.D. before he was twenty. The then studied engineering and before he was thirty, he authored "Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics” which integrated Heisenberg’s matrices with Schrodinger’s waves, a monumental accomplishment.

 

But that was only the beginning. He developed Minimax theory and at the Army’s Ballistic Research Lab he became an expert at the trajectory of artillery shells. That led him to the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos where developed the implosion lens necessary for the creation of the Atomic Bomb. He also conceived of stored program computer which had yet to be invented. Indeed, his second wife Klara was among the very first computer programmers.

 

Along the way he coauthored with Oskar Morgenstern “The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior” which revolutionized economics and was found to be very useful in business and war strategies, especially concerning the use of nuclear weapons. After World War II he divided his time among Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, Los Alamos’ Weapons Lab, and the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, California.

 

While at Rand he instrumental in the development of ICBM’s and he came up with the idea of self-replicating computers. In essence he was the progenitor of artificial intelligence.

 

Bhattacharya tells the story of a true genus who also loved to party hard. My one criticism is that several of the science and math parts of the book can be a real slog for the lay reader.

 

The full Amazon URL is at: Genius (amazon.com)

My Amazon Review of Andrew Roberts' "Churchill: Walking with Destiny"

Tory Democrat

Andrew Roberts has written what most critics have characterized as  Churchill’s best biography. I am not qualified to know whether it is the best, but it is certainly very good and remains interesting throughout its length. What impressed me most about Churchill was his raw physical courage. He saw combat in India, the Sudan, South Africa where he escaped from a POW camp and the trenches of World War I. He also demonstrated his physical stamina when he was over 60 to fly to France when it was being over-run and on his many trips to Russia and America for wartime meetings. Roberts brings out this important Churchill quality.

Although known as a conservative later in life, in his early years he was a flaming liberal by helping to orchestrate the historic People’s Budget of 1909. There he helped introduce the welfare state to Britain and worked to curtail the power of the House of Lords, hence the term Tory Democrat.

As World War I approached he recognized the evils of Prussian militarism and the importance of oil for the British Navy as he bought controlling interest in Anglo-Iranian Oil (the BP of today). Early on in the War he understood that a revolution in military affairs was underway with the coming of aircraft, tanks and submarines. As an aside in the early 1920s well ahead of practically everyone he foresaw the potential for an atomic bomb. Roberts keenly brings out Churchill’s interest in science and technology.

Of course Churchill’s big failure was the 1915 Gallipoli campaign which ended in tragedy for the British and their ANZAC allies. But he did learn one very important lesson that no matter how good a strategy is, its execution depends upon the operational details which in the case of Gallipoli ensured a disaster.

Aside from being right on Prussian militarism, Churchill was dead right on the odiousness of Russia under Lenin and Stalin and of course we remember him weaponizing the English language is his early opposition to Hitler, against the bulk of his Conservative Party, and his great speeches during the war. Simply put, Churchill got the big things right and saved England and the world.

Where Roberts fails in his biography is that he is too cavalier about Churchill’s two major domestic policy mistakes. As Chancellor of Exchequer in 1925 he return Britain to the gold standard at its pre-war level, a valuation that proved to be way to high crippling British industry. And again in the early 1950s he bought labor peace by giving into the trade unions thereby accelerating Britain’s industrial decline.

Where Roberts is very good is in his discussion of Churchill’s daily life where he was way too extravagant leading to consistent money problems until the late 1940s which were exacerbated by untimely stock market speculations. He was philo-Semitic when most of Britain’s upper classes were anti-Semitic and he supported the Zionist project in Palestine. Although he had a rough exterior he was warm and loving to his friends and family.

This review only scratches the surface of Roberts’ remarkable book. I highly recommend it for its insights into one of the giant personalities of our time and to get a sense of how the world we live in came into being.

For the full Amazon URL see: https://www.amazon.com/review/R1PYSTO3WF5RTX/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv