Alan Turing: The Enigma Man – Nigel Cawthorne
“Alan Turing – The Enigma Man” by Nigel Cawthorne is the latest in the long line of Turing-themed books i’ve been delving into recently so, here we go again!
I went into this book with some trepidation because the last Turing book i read that wasn’t by Andrew Hodges or Jack Copeland left me rather disappointed. (The Big Idea: Turing and the Computer by Paul Strathern. I wrote about it HERE). But actually i was very pleasantly surprised.
It’s by no means a long book, but it gets everything in. In fact i’d certainly recommend it if you’re looking to learn about Turing but not to the detailed extent of reading the better known works. It’s not exactly an original book, you can tell Cawthorne has taken his information from other available sources but i think he’s created something that many people may actually seek out which is a brief overview of Alan Turing’s life and work. There’s a good numbers of chapters each split up into little sub-sections. It gives you the important points and often says “this is what happened then”, “then because of this that happened”, “by doing this they did that” no wild tangents, no pages and pages of context or details just that.
However! Don’t take this to mean it’s just a big stream of boring facts with no emotion behind it because that’s not true. We still get a few fun anecdotes and personality quirks and the important people around him get mentioned where appropriate.
It’s difficult to fully explain, but as someone who has read the biographies by both Andrew Hodges and Jack Copeland this book pleased me. I felt like it got everything in there you would want to tell if you were giving an overview of Turing and his work and you still got a sense of the important moments in his life.
After the last book i was sort of semi fact-checking as i read but as far as i can see everything matched up to what i have read from other sources. There is one TINY moment in the final chapter when someone is quoted from the 1970’s in a passage that implies that Colossus was used to crack ENIGMA codes which is incorrect, but that is the mistake of the person quoted and not the author.
What is quite unique to this book though is the final chapter dedicated to saying how and through what means Alan Turing’s story bled out into the public eye. From a few published papers to the Hodges Biography and the Hugh Whitemore play. It even references “The Imitation Game” film as this version was published in 2014.
Overall, i’d recommend this book! Especially to anyone who wants to know about Turing but sees the brick sized biography of Andrew Hodges and withdraws in terror. There is the Copeland biography of course (which i wrote about HERE) especially if his work is the main focus of your interest. Maybe you want to spread the word of this wonderful man to a friend but not by giving them something too overwhelming.
If you’re interested you can find the book on amazon.com HERE, or from other shops/regional amazon sites.
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