What Non-Fiction are you currently/just read?

[eppur_se_muova]

7. Alan Turing, The Enigma by Andrew Hodges.

https://networks.h-net.org/node/9782/discussions/68036/book-review-mize-hodges-alan-turing-enigma

OK, I'm just now reading a 1983 book. But in part it's because I had already read so much about Turing's work thanks to Gödel, Escher, Bach and similar pop sci reading that I wasn't that interested in seeing it all repeated. But I do enjoy biography, and this book ran through several editions and appeared to be more or less recognized as the definitive bio Turing needed. There's considerably more detail on the work at Bletchley Park than I had ever seen anywhere (less nerdish types might find this less commendable), and I'm just now reading the section on the development of ACE,which could have seen the British pull a real scientific and industrial coup by building the first really modern computer, but the foreshadowing is hard to miss. I only wish the author did not take for granted that his audience would be familiar with the ways of the English academic world; not knowing even some of the terminology, much less its implications, it gets difficult to appreciate just where Turing stood at times -- precocious success intellectually, to be certain, but is he more or less well recognized for it ? And is any lack of recognition merely a consequence of straitened times for academia between the wars ?

Turing's tragic -- and unnecessary -- end, being already known, looms over it all, and the final sections can be expected to be unpleasant.

To anyone who watched "The Imitation Game", it might be particularly worthwhile to glance at the review at the top of this post.