RaveThe New Republic... a lucid and rewarding new biography of von Neumann that otherwise visibly quivers from the noble effort to not use too many von Neumann anecdotes. Truth to tell, Bhattacharya, a physics scholar turned science writer, is less biographer than cartographer. The book doesn’t reveal many new details of von Neumann’s life and character, and our hero himself vanishes for pages at a time. Instead, Bhattacharya composes a rich intellectual map of von Neumann’s pursuits, shading in their histories and evolutions, and tracing the routes and connections between them. He recruits every ounce of your attention: Quantum physics, nuclear bomb-making, and computer architecture are all gnarly subjects. But through his narrative, we attend the raucous birth of these disciplines, with von Neumann hovering like a fussy midwife ... One of the finest aspects of Bhattacharya’s book is his delineation of how the nuclear bomb and the modern computer flowered in parallel, and how von Neumann buzzed between the two, cross-pollinating and nurturing until one now seems inconceivable without the other.
Sujit Sivasundaram
PositiveThe Guardian (UK)Scrupulously, Sivasundaram tells much of this history from the ground up, from the perspectives of the colonised, and for this purpose, he taps the archives of a cast of astonishing, enjoyable characters – not rulers or officials, but regular folk ... If we ignore the Buddhist koan-like question of whether a revolution that is never consummated is a revolution at all, Sivasundaram is largely persuasive in his demarcations of revolutionary sentiment. Not always, though ... And despite Sivasundaram’s provision of generous evidence for indigenous agency, it is occasionally difficult to shake the suspicion that the churn in local politics in one territory or another is best explained as a proxy conflict between France and Britain – that, as with so much else, even these tiny, nascent revolutions were planted and watered for the opportunistic purposes of European imperialism. Small wonder, then, that they could be uprooted swiftly and brutally as well.
MixedThe New YorkerWhen Roy’s essays appeared individually, in magazines or newspapers, they functioned as little jabs of electricity, shocking us into reaction. Collectively, in My Seditious Heart, they remind us that many of the flaws in her nonfiction recur and persist. Her instinct to condemn becomes wearisome, and she gives us only the vaguest prescriptions for the systems she wishes would replace market-driven democracy, or dams, or globalization. She is prone to romanticizing the pre-modern, prompting us to wonder if she speaks too glibly for others ... When the dial isn’t tuned to high fulmination, Roy is easier and more moving to read. To form her opinions, or perhaps to confirm them, she travels widely across India. Her narrations of her encounters with people are tender, and her prose becomes marked by rare stillness ... Her fury is suited to these horrible and therefore simpler times; it’s more tuned to the reality on the ground than restraint and statistics ... Reading My Seditious Heart, you feel as if Roy has been hollering as extravagantly as possible for years, trying to grab our attention, and we’ve kept motoring on toward the edge of the cliff.
Tim Marshall
PositiveFinancial Times\"The tour in [the book] is, unfortunately, figurative. Marshall has reported from dozens of countries, often when they were passing through moments of howling drama, but few of those tales filter in. Instead, the case studies seem to draw more on dry policy journals and faraway newspapers than his own first-hand observation ... A giant paradox undergirds Marshall’s book, but he never quite looks it in the eye. Why is our age of walls also the most open age in humanity’s history? Why is the march of globalisation now being kept company by re-activated nationalisms? [The book] exhibits a deterministic streak that feels wearying and shallow in the face of such questions.\
