Benjamin Labatut's Books

When We Cease to Understand the World

By: Benjamin Labatut

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When We Cease to Understand the World

By: Benjamin Labatut

One of The New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2021 Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize and the 2021 National Book Award for Translated Literature A fictional examination of the lives of real-life scientists and thinkers whose discoveries resulted in moral consequences beyond their imagining. When We Cease to Understand the World is a book about the complicated links between scientific and mathematical discovery, madness, and destruction. Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger—these are some of luminaries into whose troubled lives Benjamín Labatut thrusts the reader, showing us how they grappled with the most profound questions of existence. They have strokes of unparalleled genius, alienate friends and lovers, descend into isolation and insanity. Some of their discoveries reshape human life for the better; others pave the way to chaos and unimaginable suffering. The lines are never clear. At a breakneck pace and with a wealth of disturbing detail, Labatut uses the imaginative resources of fiction to tell the stories of the scientists and mathematicians who expanded our notions of the possible.

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Page Count

193

Publisher

New York Review of Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

1681375664

ISBN 13

9781681375663

The MANIAC

By: Benjamin Labatut

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The MANIAC

By: Benjamin Labatut

Named One of the 10 Best Books of 2023 by The Washington Post and Publishers Weekly • One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2023 • A National Bestseller • A New York Times Editor's Choice pick • Nominated for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction “Captivating and unclassifiable, at once a historical novel and a philosophical foray . . . Labatut is a 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 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.

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Page Count

369

Publisher

Penguin Group

Published Date

ISBN 10

0593654498

ISBN 13

9780593654491

The MANIAC

By: Benjamin Labatut

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The MANIAC

By: Benjamin Labatut

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 world of beauty and fabulous momentum, The MANIAC's unique blend of fact and fiction confronts us with the deepest questions we face as a species.

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Page Count

298

Publisher

Strange Light

Published Date

ISBN 10

0771010427

ISBN 13

9780771010422

When We Cease to Understand the World

By: Benjamin Labatut

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When We Cease to Understand the World

By: Benjamin Labatut

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193

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New York Review of Books

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ISBN 10

1681375664

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9781681375663

La Revolución

Mexico's Great Revolution as Memory, Myth, and History

By: Thomas Benjamin

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La Revolución

Mexico's Great Revolution as Memory, Myth, and History

By: Thomas Benjamin

The 1910 Revolution is still tangibly present in Mexico in the festivals that celebrate its victories, on the monuments to its heroes, and, most important, in the stories and memories of the Mexican people. Yet there has never been general agreement on what the revolution meant, what its objectives were, and whether they have been accomplished. This pathfinding book shows how Mexicans from 1910 through the 1950s interpreted the revolution, tried to make sense of it, and, through collective memory, myth-making, and history writing, invented an idea called "la Revolución." In part one, Thomas Benjamin follows the historical development of different and often opposing revolutionary traditions and the state's efforts to forge them into one unified and unifying narrative. In part two, he examines ways of remembering the past and making it relevant to the present through fiestas, monuments, and official history. This research clarifies how the revolution has served to authorize and legitimize political factions and particular regimes to the present day. Beyond the Mexican case, it demonstrates how history is used to serve the needs of the present.

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Page Count

252

Publisher

University of Texas Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0292782977

ISBN 13

9780292782976

Time and Environmental Law

Telling Nature's Time

By: Benjamin J. Richardson

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Time and Environmental Law

Telling Nature's Time

By: Benjamin J. Richardson

Through the lens of time, the book critiques environmental law and recommends ways to enable it to respond to nature's time scales.

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Page Count

439

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1107191246

ISBN 13

9781107191242

The Brain in Search of Itself

Santiago Ramón y Cajal and the Story of the Neuron

By: Benjamin Ehrlich

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The Brain in Search of Itself

Santiago Ramón y Cajal and the Story of the Neuron

By: Benjamin Ehrlich

Passionate and meticulous . . . [Ehrlich] delivers thought-provoking metaphors, unforgettable scenes and many beautifully worded phrases." —Benjamin Labatut, The New York Times Book Review One of The Telegraph's best books of the year The first major biography of the Nobel Prize–winning scientist who discovered neurons and transformed our understanding of the human mind—illustrated with his extraordinary anatomical drawings Unless you’re a neuroscientist, Santiago Ramón y Cajal is likely the most important figure in the history of biology you’ve never heard of. Along with Charles Darwin and Louis Pasteur, he ranks among the most brilliant and original biologists of the nineteenth century, and his discoveries have done for our understanding of the human brain what the work of Galileo and Sir Isaac Newton did for our conception of the physical universe. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1906 for his lifelong investigation of the structure of neurons: “The mysterious butterflies of the soul,” Cajal called them, “whose beating of wings may one day reveal to us the secrets of the mind.” And he produced a dazzling oeuvre of anatomical drawings, whose alien beauty grace the pages of medical textbooks and the walls of museums to this day. Benjamin Ehrlich’s The Brain in Search of Itself is the first major biography in English of this singular figure, whose scientific odyssey mirrored the rocky journey of his beloved homeland of Spain into the twentieth century. Born into relative poverty in a mountaintop hamlet, Cajal was an enterprising and unruly child whose ambitions were both nurtured and thwarted by his father, a country doctor with a flinty disposition. A portrait of a nation as well a biography, The Brain in Search of Itself follows Cajal from the hinterlands to Barcelona and Madrid, where he became an illustrious figure—resisting and ultimately transforming the rigid hierarchies and underdeveloped science that surrounded him. To momentous effect, Cajal devised a theory that was as controversial in his own time as it is universal in ours: that the nervous system is comprised of individual cells with distinctive roles, just like any other organ in the body. In one of the greatest scientific rivalries in history, he argued his case against Camillo Golgi and prevailed. In our age of neuro-imaging and investigations into the neural basis of the mind, Cajal is the artistic and scientific forefather we must get to know. The Brain in Search of Itself is at once the story of how the brain as we know it came into being and a finely wrought portrait of an individual as fantastical and complex as the subject to which he devoted his life.

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Page Count

274

Publisher

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published Date

ISBN 10

0374718776

ISBN 13

9780374718770

Wyeth's Oregon

Or a Short History of a Long Journey

By: John Wyeth,Benjamin Waterhouse

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Wyeth's Oregon

Or a Short History of a Long Journey

By: John Wyeth,Benjamin Waterhouse

It is, indeed, a short history of a long journey, spanning the entire U.S., from Boston to Oregon.

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Applewood Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

1429001674

ISBN 13

9781429001670

3 books to know Social Novel

By: Benjamin Disraeli,Victor Hugo,Émile Zola,August Nemo

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3 books to know Social Novel

By: Benjamin Disraeli,Victor Hugo,Émile Zola,August Nemo

Welcome to the3 Books To Knowseries, our idea is to help readers learn about fascinating topics through three essential and relevant books. These carefully selected works can be fiction, non-fiction, historical documents or even biographies. We will always select for you three great works to instigate your mind, this time the topic is:Social Novel: Sybil - Benjamin Disraeli Les Misérables - Victor Hugo Germinal - Émile Zola Social novel is a work of fiction in which a social problem is dramatized through its effect on the characters. Usually a social novel limits itself to exposure of a problem. A personal solution may be arrived at by the novel's characters, but the author does not insist that it can be applied universally or that it is the only one. Benjamin Disraeli's Sybil is one of the first social-problem novels. Sibyl deals with the social and economic disparity between the rich and the poor as a result of the Industrial Revolution. Les Misérables is the magnum opus of the French writer Victor Hugo. It narrates the French political and social situation in the Democratic Uprising. The book draws a critical parallel to the material development of society and the consequent exclusion of poor people. Germinal is Zola's masterpiece and one of the most significant novels in the French tradition. The story takes place in France during a strike caused by the reduction of wages. To compose Germinal, the author spent two months working as a miner in the extraction of coal. Zola describes the principle of the political and trade union organization of the working class, such as the existing divisions between Marxists and anarchists. This is one of many books in the series 3 Books To Know. If you liked this book, look for the other titles in the series, we are sure you will like some of the topics.

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Page Count

2801

Publisher

Tacet Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

3968589009

ISBN 13

9783968589008

The Brain in Search of Itself

Santiago Ramón y Cajal and the Story of the Neuron

By: Benjamin Ehrlich

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The Brain in Search of Itself

Santiago Ramón y Cajal and the Story of the Neuron

By: Benjamin Ehrlich

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Solve jigsaw puzzle

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Page Count

274

Publisher

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published Date

ISBN 10

0374718776

ISBN 13

9780374718770

Book's by Benjamin Labatut

When We Cease to Understand the World

When We Cease to Understand the World

The MANIAC

The MANIAC

The MANIAC

The MANIAC

When We Cease to Understand the World

When We Cease to Understand the World

La Revolución

La Revolución

Time and Environmental Law

Time and Environmental Law

The Brain in Search of Itself

The Brain in Search of Itself

Wyeth's Oregon

Wyeth's Oregon

3 books to know Social Novel

3 books to know Social Novel

The Brain in Search of Itself

The Brain in Search of Itself

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