The MANIAC -- Benjamin Labatut - Hardcover

Description: "A contemporary writer of thrilling originality . . . The MANIAC is a work of dark, eerie and singular beauty." --The Washington Post "Darkly absorbing . . . A brooding, heady narrative that is addictively interesting." --Wall Street Journal "What [Labatut] brings to the page is something almost indescribably layered and complex that feels like a genre unto itself." --San Francisco Chronicle From one of contemporary literature's most exciting new voices, a haunting story centered on the Hungarian polymath John von Neumann, tracing the impact of his singular legacy on the dreams and nightmares of the twentieth century and the nascent age of AI Benjamín Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World el Book and Mortar Record Store The MANIAC -- Benjamin Labatut "A contemporary writer of thrilling originality . . . The MANIAC is a work of dark, eerie and singular beauty." --The Washington Post "Darkly absorbing . . . A brooding, heady narrative that is addictively interesting." --Wall Street Journal "What [Labatut] brings to the page is something almost indescribably layered and complex that feels like a genre unto itself." --San Francisco Chronicle From one of contemporary literature's most exciting new voices, a haunting story centered on the Hungarian polymath John von Neumann, tracing the impact of his singular legacy on the dreams and nightmares of the twentieth century and the nascent age of AI Benjamín Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World electrified a global readership. A Booker Prize and National Book Award finalist, and one of the New York Times' Ten Best Books of the Year, it explored the life and thought of a clutch of mathematicians and physicists who took science to strange and sometimes dangerous new realms. In The MANIAC, Labatut has created a tour de force on an even grander scale. A prodigy whose gifts terrified the people around him, John von Neumann transformed every field he touched, inventing game theory and the first programable computer, and pioneering AI, digital life, and cellular automata. Through a chorus of family members, friends, colleagues, and rivals, Labatut shows us the evolution of a mind unmatched and of a body of work that has unmoored the world in its wake. The MANIAC places von Neumann at the center of a literary triptych that begins with Paul Ehrenfest, an Austrian physicist and friend of Einstein, who fell into despair when he saw science and technology become tyrannical forces; it ends a hundred years later, in the showdown between the South Korean Go Master Lee Sedol and the AI program AlphaGo, an encounter embodying the central question of von Neumann's most ambitious unfinished project: the creation of a self-reproducing machine, an intelligence able to evolve beyond human understanding or control. A work of beauty and fabulous momentum, The MANIAC confronts us with the deepest questions we face as a species. Author: Benjamin Labatut Publisher: Penguin Press Published: 10/03/2023 Pages: 368 Binding Type: Hardcover Weight: 1.21lbs Size: 9.29h x 6.31w x 1.20d ISBN: 9780593654477 Review Citation(s): Library Journal Prepub Alert 05/01/2023 pg. 4 Library Journal 07/01/2023 pg. 64 Publishers Weekly 07/17/2023 Kirkus Reviews 08/01/2023 Booklist 09/01/2023 pg. 43 About the Author Benjamín Labatut is a Chilean author born in The Netherlands in 1980. He was raised in The Hague before settling in Chile, where he lives and works. He is the author of Antarctica starts here (2009), a short story collection, After the Light (2016), a series of scientific, philosophical and historical notes on the void, The Stone of Madness (2021), a diptych on madness, chaos and modernity, and When We Cease to Understand the World (2021), a book which explores the ecstasy and agony of scientific breakthroughs and has been translated into over 30 languages.

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End Time: 2024-12-20T12:25:46.000Z

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Genre 1: Books,Subjects,Literature & Fiction,Genre Fiction,Historical,Worl

Label: Penguin Press

Artist: Labatut, Benjamin

Album: The MANIAC

Book Title: Maniac

Number of Pages: 368 Pages

Language: English

Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

Topic: Literary, Political

Item Height: 1.2 in

Publication Year: 2023

Illustrator: Yes

Genre: Fiction

Item Weight: 20.2 Oz

Author: Benjamin Labatut

Item Length: 9.3 in

Item Width: 6.2 in

Format: Hardcover