Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges

I believe I first read about Alan Turing in one of those jumbo-sized children’s books that are available on all sorts of topics and are often given as birthday gifts to people like me, who love to read.  The topic of this book was espionage, and my young mind was thrilled to be reading about Turing’s role as a code breaker at Bletchley Park during World War II.  I rediscovered Turing in high school and was fascinated to learn more about his life, including his tragic suicide after being convicted of the “crime” of homosexuality by the British government and chemically castrated as punishment.

It was around this time that I first heard of Andrew Hodges’ Alan Turing: The Enigma, widely regarded as the definitive Turing biography.  Unfortunately, the book was not currently in print in the U.S., and it was impossible for me to get my hands on a copy in good condition.  All of that changed in 2012, which was designated Alan Turing Year in the UK as a celebration of the mathematician’s life and successes.  Not only was The Enigma republished in the U.S., but Turing himself was pardoned by the Queen in 2013 and The Imitation Game, a biopic of Turing starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley, premiered in 2014 (see the trailer here).

You may be wondering, if I bought Alan Turing: The Enigma in 2012, why did it take me five years to finally read it?  The main reason is that I was applying to colleges that same year, and wanted both to focus on my academic coursework, and to stick to books in my free time that required less “reading comprehension.”  By the time I felt ready to pick up the book, as any bibliophile can attest, I had so many other books on the shelf competing for my attention that time simply got away from me.

Unfortunately, the very concern that made me hesitant to pick up The Enigma in 2012 is the very reason that, in 2017, I was forced to put it down unfinished.  In the prologue I learned that Andrew Hodges, the biographer, is an Oxford mathematician who has contributed to the field through his work in “twister theory,” a subject whose Wikipedia page I didn’t even try to understand.  Of course, this makes Hodges the perfect match for writing about a genius like Turing, but it also makes the work quite difficult for the layman to read.  I greatly enjoyed reading the passages about Turing’s childhood and school days — for example, I learned that he had trouble discerning left from right as a boy, and always put a mark on his left thumb to tell the difference — but once I started entering the chapters about his work, I was totally lost.

I attended school for liberal arts, and while I did well in high school algebra and calculus and even took a statistics class in college, math has never been something I retained well or enjoyed.  While reading Hodges’ explanations, I found myself reading the same paragraphs over again in an attempt to grasp the meaning.  If I skipped a math-heavy section in an attempt to rejoin the saga of Turing’s life, however, the biography did not make as much sense, as it was missing the most crucial element.  Regrettably, it seemed that this book and I were ill-matched.

I would recommend Alan Turing: The Enigma to anyone who wants to learn more about the life of this underappreciated, truly remarkable man, someone who has been largely forgotten by history outside of his native country and who was oppressed during his lifetime for being who he was.  HOWEVER, I think a necessary prerequisite of reading this text may also be a good grasp of higher-level mathematics and some basic computer hardware terminology.  For myself, I hope to be back with you at some point in the future with a Turing biography that is more accessible to me.

The Lost City of Z by David Grann

I had just finished reading The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon last weekend when my SO and I went to see The Belko Experiment.  During the previews, I was absolutely shocked to see a trailer for a film adaptation of Z starring Charlie Hunnam and Robert Pattinson.  (Check out the trailers for The Belko Experiment and The Lost City of Z here and here, as I enjoyed the former and will be looking forward to the latter.)  I had no idea that a film of The Lost City of Z would be coming out when I began reading the book.  Rather, I had recently picked it up used at a favorite secondhand bookstore on the recommendation of my dad, who read it years ago when it first came out.  Dad is one of my main influences when it comes to my love of literature — he still reads voraciously despite his current battle with a terminal neurodegenerative illness.  At any rate, I was glad to give a book that he loved a try.

The Lost City of Z is nonfiction and reads part-biography, part travelogue, and part mystery.  The main text tells the life story of Colonel Percy Fawcett, one of the “last great explorers” of the Victorian Era who, along with his colleagues of the UK’s Royal Geographical Society, made it their mission to complete Britain’s map of the world.  While other explorers conquered the polar regions or the savannahs of Africa, Fawcett set his sights on the Amazonian rainforest, achieving great renown for his contributions to geographical understanding at the time.

As Fawcett reached middle age, however, he developed an interest in local legends of a great ancient civilization that was said to have once dwelt in the rainforest.  These folk tales flew in the face of prevailing scientific theories of the day, which not only held that the rainforests were inhospitable to the development of agriculture and large cities, but also that the indigenous American peoples were intellectually incapable of forming complex societies.  Fawcett gradually became obsessed with discovering the fabled civilization, which he nicknamed “Z,” and eventually mounted an expedition into the Amazonian interior with his eldest son and his son’s best friend.  The three entered the jungle in 1925 and were never seen again.

Grann skillfully interweaves this biography of Fawcett with efforts to find the Fawcett party in the years after their disappearance.  The rescue efforts read like a suspense thriller in places, with one group being held for ransom by a hostile tribe, for example, and another driven out of the jungle in an ambush with locals armed with poison-tipped arrowheads.  The author is even drawn into an expedition of his own, leading to a “twist ending” that even I did not expect, but which I found much more satisfying than any other outcome I could have expected from a book with this premise.

Reading The Lost City of Z, it is clear that Grann is a journalist by trade, as he is masterly at pacing and maintaining the reader’s interest.  More than many other books I have read recently, I found this one hard to put down and was eager to find out what happened next, a rarity when it comes to nonfiction.  I also appreciated Grann’s willingness to share his own humanity with the audience.  We learn through the course of the text about Fawcett’s unhealthy obsession with Z, and likewise about the way that countless explorers became obsessed with finding Fawcett once he vanished.  Grann is candid with the reader in explaining that while at first this was “just another article” for him, as he continued to investigate the story, he too felt the pull of obsession drawing him into the search for Fawcett and Z.  This connection between Grann and Fawcett added another level of authenticity to the novel that was well appreciated.

In conclusion, I would recommend The Lost City of Z to those who are interested in trying nonfiction, as this is a good example of accessible nonfiction that reads like a page-turner.  Z is also an excellent read for people who have an interest in The Age of Exploration, as it alludes to many other explorers of the day and has extensive annotations that can give you a jump-start.