Cover Image: Analogia

Analogia

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Review of Analogia: The Emergence of Technology Beyond Programmable Control, by George Dyson

This is a review of a book supplied by Netgalley.

Link to Goodreads review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3567977752?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1

George Dyson has led a fascinating life: he is the son of a field theorist and a group theorist, the brother of a tech pioneer. He has built kayaks, lived in a treehouse, and has written histories of computation and atomic-powered space exploration. Analogia plots a peculiar course through all of these worlds, a tour of the analog world before the emergence of our current digital world. It ranges from the Bering-Chirikov Russian exploration of North America, to the design of kayaks, to the common ancestry of atomic weapons and numerical computers. Gottfried Leibniz, best known as the co-inventor of calculus, makes frequent appearances as a proposer of both early computing devices and exploration of the region now known as the Bering Straight. Native Americans make appearances in both the Western Plains and the Pacific Northwest. The book concludes with the Ghost Dance, the Native American rite for a new utopia free of the people and technologies that conquered them. The ending, like the whole book, is beautiful and elegiac.

Dyson was born and bred by the people who built the modern world, yet left for kayaks and treehouses in the Pacific Northwest. His writing has covered the achievements of modernity as well as the sophistication of the world that preceded and was replaced by modernity. Analogia is something of a synthesis of the two, peculiar and personal and beautiful. It is not a completely successful synthesis for the reader. Dyson's leaps from baidarka kayaks to Project Orion spacecraft can be hard to follow for anyone who hasn't thought as long or as deeply on the two worlds as Dyson has, and sometimes the mashup feels contrived. But the book is interesting and well-written enough to keep one reading.

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An excellent book that mixes history with personal stories. I learned a lot and it made me reflect.
I liked the style of writing and the storytelling.
Recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.

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I enjoyed this book. Dyson writes well, and he has an interesting life path that made me want to learn more. He weaves history with current events in a seamless way. I did sometimes wonder why in the world he was talking about far-off pieces of history when the book is about machines, but he is always able to connect the dots. It was a fun read for me.

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Honestly one of the weirder books I’ve ever read—computing, the history of colonialism, and George Dyson’s fascinating life all mashed together in one extremely well-written book. But I learned a lot. I *expect* to talk about this book in my summer column but that (and the continuance of the column itself) isn’t a sure thing.

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