The Book Depository blog

I like the title of this book, Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind, almost as much as any of the ones chosen for the British Diagram Prize! And great to see it getting reviewed -- by none other than Russian chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov, don't you know! -- in the New York Review of Books:

In 1985, in Hamburg, I played against thirty-two different chess computers at the same time in what is known as a simultaneous exhibition. I walked from one machine to the next, making my moves over a period of more than five hours. The four leading chess computer manufacturers had sent their top models, including eight named after me from the electronics firm Saitek.

It illustrates the state of computer chess at the time that it didn't come as much of a surprise when I achieved a perfect 32-0 score, winning every game, although there was an uncomfortable moment. At one point I realized that I was drifting into trouble in a game against one of the "Kasparov" brand models. If this machine scored a win or even a draw, people would be quick to say that I had thrown the game to get PR for the company, so I had to intensify my efforts. Eventually I found a way to trick the machine with a sacrifice it should have refused. From the human perspective, or at least from my perspective, those were the good old days of man vs. machine chess.

Eleven years later I narrowly defeated the supercomputer Deep Blue in a match. Then, in 1997, IBM redoubled its efforts -- and doubled Deep Blue's processing power -- and I lost the rematch in an event that made headlines around the world. The result was met with astonishment and grief by those who took it as a symbol of mankind's submission before the almighty computer. ("The Brain's Last Stand" read the Newsweek headline.) Others shrugged their shoulders, surprised that humans could still compete at all against the enormous calculating power that, by 1997, sat on just about every desk in the first world (more...)

Now then! I like the sound of this: "Love and the novel, the individual in history, the existential plight of the graduate student: all find their place in The Possessed. Literally and metaphorically following the footsteps of her favorite authors, Elif Batuman searches for the answers to the big questions in the details of lived experience, combining fresh readings of the great Russians, from Pushkin to Platonov, with the sad and funny stories of the lives they continue to influence -- including her own."

That blurb (above) was from the publisher, this quote below, which only whets my appetite further, is from the New York Times:

Early in Elif Batuman's funny and melancholy first book, The Possessed, she describes her disillusionment, as a would-be novelist, with "the transcendentalist New England culture of 'creative writing.'" The problem with creative writing programs, she says, is their obsession with craft.

"What did craft ever try to say about the world, the human condition, or the search for meaning?" Ms. Batuman asks. "All it had were its negative dictates: 'Show, don't tell'; 'Murder your darlings'; 'Omit needless words.' As if writing were a matter of overcoming bad habits -- of omitting needless words."

Ms. Batuman's search for something more from literature than "brisk verbs and vivid nouns" led her, swooning but alert, into the arms of the great Russian writers: Tolstoy, Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Babel.

And it led her to write this odd and oddly profound little book, one that's ostensibly about her favorite Russians but is actually about a million other things: grad school, literary theory, translation, biography, love affairs, the making of "King Kong," working for the Let's Go travel guidebook series, songs by the Smiths, even how to choose a nice watermelon in Uzbekistan. Crucially and fundamentally, it is also an examination of this question: How do we bring our lives closer to our favorite books? (More...)

Writing in the New York Times, Dwight Garner takes a look at James S. Hirsch's new book, Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend:

In his 1979 movie, Manhattan, Woody Allen made a list of the things that make life worth living. At the top sat Groucho Marx. But just behind Groucho -- and before the second movement of Mozart's Jupiter Symphony, Louis Armstrong's recording of Potato Head Blues and "those incredible apples and pears by Cezanne" -- came Willie Mays.

By 1979 Willie Mays had been retired for six years, and his best years as a player were at least a decade and a half behind him. But Mays's infectious smile, his casually electric playmaking, his pell-mell base-running style, his rocket arm (Joe DiMaggio called it the best he ever saw) and his home runs that blasted holes in outfield fences still defined -- and continue to define -- what baseball, in a perfect world, should look like.

Mays's gifts were almost preternatural. "Willie must have been born under some kind of star," said Leo Durocher, his manager in the early 1950s with the New York Giants. The journalist Murray Kempton compared the originality of Mays's plays to Faulkner and the Delta blues. The sportswriter Roger Kahn said that "Willie's exuberance was his immortality."

Over the years Mays has issued two ghostwritten autobiographies. But James S. Hirsch's new book, Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend, is the first biography written with Mays's participation. (Mr. Hirsch and Mays intend to split the book's earnings.) The result is an authoritative if sometimes listless book, one that's less "Say Hey" than so-so. Like a long out to center field that scores a runner, however, it's a book that gets the job done (more...)

The Boston Times takes a look at Peter A. Carlin's life of my fellow Scouser, Sir Paul McCartney:

The story is familiar: As arguably the greatest rock n' roll band, the Beatles ruled 60s culture. John Lennon was the smart one and the leader; Paul McCartney, the cute No. 2; George Harrison, the restless genius-in-waiting; and Ringo Starr, the funny reality check.

In Paul McCartney: A Life, Peter A. Carlin offers a reconsideration of the dynamics of the band and McCartney's role in it, arguing that Paul was as much a leader as John. But he also offers a complex portrait of an artist whose insecurities were fanned when he was in the presence of talented musicians with strong artistic visions, but who did his best work when around them.

As primary evidence, Carlin presents an appropriately unflattering analysis of McCartney's work after the Beatles broke up in 1970. Despite occasionally great post-Beatles music like the singles Maybe I'm Amazed, Live and Let Die, and the albums Band on the Run and the fabulously retro Run Devil Run, he observes that McCartney failed to grow beyond the work he did with Lennon.

For this warm, fair book, Carlin interviewed childhood friends, former business associates, and members of various McCartney bands, particularly Wings -- but was not, unfortunately, granted interviews with McCartney or Starr. Carlin's description of the process involved in McCartney's creation of Yesterday and of the influence McCartney's effortless musicality had on the group underscore how much influence he had on the direction of the iconic band (more...)

The Financial Times gets to grips with Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy by Nobel-prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz declaring it "the best book so far on the financial crisis":

Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel prize-winning economist, is knowledgeable about the historical background, immersed in the policy debate and a pioneer of the economic theories needed to understand the origins of the problems. Although the material is necessarily difficult at times, the book is also easy to read. It is therefore indispensable not just for those who (like me) are broadly sympathetic to the Stiglitz position but for those who would rebut these charges.

Stiglitz's account begins in the 1980s, the decade of deregulation and privatisation. The symbol of these changes for financial markets was the replacement of Paul Volcker by Alan Greenspan as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. This set the way for light regulation of the banking system and created a willingness to respond to any market setback with a relaxation of monetary policy -- the "Greenspan put". These developments were not the result of policy oversight but of policy design. Conservatives and Wall Street got the policy framework they had sought (more...)