Turing

A detailed, informative account of Turing’s life.

There’s a lot of detail about his work – enough that as a fairly technical reader, I understood at a high level what Turing was working on, more than just “he did a clever thing here” – but also a lot about his personal life, and post-BP work, that was new to me.

A common trap is to paint Turing as a heroic British learner, or focus solely on what he did at Bletchley Park. This book avoids both. While it has plenty of detail about BP, I was glad to read a lot of new (to me) material about the people he worked with, their contributions, and the work he did both before and after WWII. I particularly enjoyed the chapter on his death, which challenges the commonly-held belief that he must have committed suicide.

By no means an essential read, but worth a look if you find this sort of thing interesting.

(see all reviews)