It’s 1966 at a Museum of Modern Art’s opening of new street photography of Walker Evans, taken in the 1930s. As to be expected, the attendees are the rich and powerful social elite on Manhattan, including a late middle-aged couple. As they stroll through the gallery, looking at the photos, the wife suddenly freezes, as she realized that the photo of what at the time was called a hobo, from 1939, was that of her friend Tinker Grey, who by then was clearly living rough.
As the couple was leaving the museum, the husband saw another photo of Grey, but now of a healthy and clearly prosperous Grey. The husband commented to his wife that he was glad that Grey had recovered from living on the streets. But his wife pointed out that Grey’s story arc was not rags to riches, as the prosperous Grey photo was taken two years before the hobo Grey photo.
All of this is in the preface, setting up the mystery of Tinker Grey.
Chapter One begins on New Year’s Eve of 1937, when the 1966 wife was not a wife but instead a poor struggling working class girl trying to survive in Manhattan during the depths of the Depression. The book shows how she enters the social elite of New York City, through talent, intelligence and ambition, and all through her interactions with the initially mysterious Tinker Grey.
From the #1 New York Times-bestselling author of The Lincoln Highway and A Gentleman in Moscow, a “sharply stylish” (Boston Globe) book about a young woman in post-Depression era New York who suddenly finds herself thrust into high society—now with over one million readers worldwide
On the last night of 1937, twenty-five-year-old Katey Kontent is in a second-rate Greenwich Village jazz bar when Tinker Grey, a handsome banker, happens to sit down at the neighboring table. This chance encounter and its startling consequences propel Katey on a year-long journey into the upper echelons of New York society—where she will have…
In November of 1976, in my senior year of high school, Jimmy Carter was elected president. In November 1980, in my senior year of college, Ronald Reagan was elected. Thus my first four years as a political “adult” is precisely the time frame of this book.
The author captures and rekindles my memories of those years. Certainly I can now recall why I was a big Jimmy Carter fan, a man who was decent, compassionate and who saw nuance. And I agreed whole heartedly with his diagnosis of the root causes of the nation’s crisis of culture, which lead to his (at the time) infamous “Malaise” speech. I could also see how in the end his was a failed presidency.
Particularly telling is how what is now called the “main stream media” refused to take seriously the candidacy of Ronald Reagan. For the media, the front runner should have been John Connelly, former governor of Texas. The media simply could not see that the people in the GOP overwhelmingly supported Reagan. And they did not see that Reagan, with his incredible optimism for the future of the USA, was precisely what was needed to lift the nation out of our malaise, setting up the next eight years of his presidency. (To be clear, as a Carter fan, I gave my first presidential vote to Jimmy.)
From the bestselling author of Nixonland and The Invisible Bridge comes the dramatic conclusion of how conservatism took control of American political power.
Over two decades, Rick Perlstein has published three definitive works about the emerging dominance of conservatism in modern American politics. With the saga's final installment, he has delivered yet another stunning literary and historical achievement.
In late 1976, Ronald Reagan was dismissed as a man without a political future: defeated in his nomination bid against a sitting president of his own party, blamed for President Gerald Ford's defeat, too…
John von Neumann was a scientific and intellectual colossus of 20th century science and mathematics. He was one of the first creators of computers, one of the key figures in early quantum mechanics, a founder of game theory, and who did significant work in all kinds of mathematics. There are good reasons that his biography by Ananyo Bhattachara was titled: Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John Neumann.
But The Manica is not a biography, per se. Instead, each chapter is written in the voice of one his colleagues, friends or family. Labatut did an excellent job of capturing each of their personalities. It is a great read.
The last part shifts completely away from von Neumann, turning instead to the word of Go, telling the story of how AI in the form of AlphaGo beat Go champion Lee Sedol. If you read this book, you will see how this additional last ninety pages does bookend the first 250 pages on von Neumann.
From the author of When We Cease to Understand the World: a dazzling, kaleidoscopic book about the destructive chaos lurking in the history of computing and AIJohnny von Neumann was an enigma. As a young man, he stunned those around him with his monomaniacal pursuit of the unshakeable foundations of mathematics. But when his faith in this all-encompassing system crumbled, he began to put his prodigious intellect to use for those in power. As he designed unfathomable computer systems and aided the development of the atomic bomb, his work pushed increasingly into areas that were beyond human comprehension and control…
People who are starting graduate school in mathematics are full of hopes and dreams to become great mathematicians. That is good. But most are suddenly confronted with the cold hard fact that they are expected to know a daunting breadth of mathematics, a breadth that few actually have or even could have had. This book is an attempt to help my younger future colleagues. Each of its twenty chapters cover a key part of the math needed for graduate school. All beginning graduate students know the math in some of the chapters. Hardly any are comfortable with the material in all of the chapters. This book will help them “get into the game,” concentrating on why the math in each chapter is important and pointing them to resources to learn more.
