Books about Berlinski from Amazon.com

As the meaning of Thatcher' legacy becomes relevant once more, this funny and opinionated book gives an important and unconventional new perspective on the Iron Lady. In this important new biography, journalist and author Claire Berlinski re-examines the life and legacy of one of the most fascinating and controversial figures of the twentieth century, Margaret Thatcher. This is no insider's memoir. Although Berlinski lived in the UK for the latter half of the Thatcher era, she did not know and hasn't met the former Prime Minister. She has created her portrait from biographies, from historical archives, and, most importantly, from speaking to people who did know her, including key figures like Bernard Ingham and Neil Kinnock. And her conversations with them are pointed and often hilarious.Claire Berlinksi's aim is to offer a portrait of a woman whose influence extends far beyond Great Britain, and far beyond her moment of power. Her victories brought bitter costs in human misery and social discord and her legacy is mixed and in some ways disturbing but ultimately, argues Claire Berlinski, we should be on her side. "There is No Alternative" is not some moist hagiographic portrayal. Berlinski's aim is to convey a full textured portrait of the woman and her legacy, her flaws and missteps as well as her triumphs..
Price: $15.92 [Notify me when price goes down.]

.
Price: $7.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Militant atheism is on the rise. Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens have dominated bestseller lists with books denigrating religious belief as dangerous foolishness. And these authors are merely the leading edge of a far larger movement–one that now includes much of the scientific community.

“The attack on traditional religious thought,” writes David Berlinski in The Devil’s Delusion, “marks the consolidation in our time of science as the single system of belief in which rational men and women might place their faith, and if not their faith, then certainly their devotion.”

A secular Jew, Berlinski nonetheless delivers a biting defense of religious thought. An acclaimed author who has spent his career writing about mathematics and the sciences, he turns the scientific community’s cherished skepticism back on itself, daring to ask and answer some rather embarrassing questions:

Has anyone provided a proof of God’s inexistence?
Not even close.

Has quantum cosmology explained the emergence of the universe or why it is here?
Not even close.

Have the sciences explained why our universe seems to be fine-tuned to allow for the existence of life?
Not even close.

Are physicists and biologists willing to believe in anything so long as it is not religious thought?
Close enough.

Has rationalism in moral thought provided us with an understanding of what is good, what is right, and what is moral?
Not close enough.

Has secularism in the terrible twentieth century been a force for good?
Not even close to being close.

Is there a narrow and oppressive orthodoxy of thought and opinion within the sciences?
Close enough.

Does anything in the sciences or in their philosophy justify the claim that religious belief is irrational?
Not even ballpark.

Is scientific atheism a frivolous exercise in intellectual contempt?
Dead on.

Berlinski does not dismiss the achievements of western science. The great physical theories, he observes, are among the treasures of the human race. But they do nothing to answer the questions that religion asks, and they fail to offer a coherent description of the cosmos or the methods by which it might be investigated.

This brilliant, incisive, and funny book explores the limits of science and the pretensions of those who insist it can be–indeed must be–the ultimate touchstone for understanding our world and ourselves..
Price: $150.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Sir Isaac Newton, creator of the first and perhaps most important scientific theory, is a giant of the scientific era. Despite this, he has remained inaccessible to most modern readers, indisputably great but undeniably remote.

In this witty, engaging, and often moving examination of Newton's life, David Berlinski recovers the man behind the mathematical breakthroughs. The story carries the reader from Newton's unremarkable childhood to his awkward undergraduate days at Cambridge through the astonishing year in which, working alone, he laid the foundation for his system of the world, his Principia Mathematica, and to the subsequent monumental feuds that poisoned his soul and wearied his supporters.

An edifying appreciation of Newton's greatest accomplishment, Newton's Gift is also a touching celebration of a transcendent man.

.
Price: $5.50 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Were it not for the calculus, mathematicians would have no way to describe the acceleration of a motorcycle or the effect of gravity on thrown balls and distant planets, or to prove that a man could cross a room and eventually touch the opposite wall. Just how calculus makes these things possible and in doing so finds a correspondence between real numbers and the real world is the subject of this dazzling book by a writer of extraordinary clarity and stylistic brio. Even as he initiates us into the mysteries of real numbers, functions, and limits, Berlinski explores the furthest implications of his subject, revealing how the calculus reconciles the precision of numbers with the fluidity of the changing universe.



"An odd and tantalizing book by a writer who takes immense pleasure in this great mathematical tool, and tries to create it in others."--New York Times Book Review.
Price: $5.50 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Old Europe’s new crisis.


Europe, the charming continent of windmills and gondolas. But lately, Europe has become the continent of endless strikes and demonstrations, bombs on the trains and subways, radical Islamic cells in every city, and ghettos so hopeless and violent even the police won’t enter them. In Spain, a terrorist attack prompts instant capitulation to the terrorists’ demands. In France, the suburbs go up in flames every night. In Holland, politicians and artists are murdered for speaking frankly about Islamic immigration.

This isn’t the Europe we thought we knew. What’s going on over there?

Traveling overland from London to Istanbul, journalist Claire Berlinski shows why the Continent has lately appeared so bewildering—and often so thoroughly obnoxious—to Americans. Speaking to Muslim immigrants, German rock stars, French cops, and Italian women who have better things to do than have children, she finds that Europe is still, despite everything, in the grip of the same old ancient demons. Anyone who knows the history can sense it: There is something ugly—and familiar—in the air.

But something new is happening as well. Indeed, Europe now confronts—and seems unable to cope with—an entirely new set of troubles. Tracing the ancient conflicts and newly erupting crises, Menace in Europe reveals:

• Why Islamic radicalism and terrorist indoctrination flourish as Europe fails to assimilate millions of Muslim immigrants

• How plummeting birthrates hurtle Europe toward economic and cultural catastrophe

• Why hatred of America has become ubiquitous—on Europe’s streets, in its books, newspapers, and music, and at the highest levels of government

• How long-repressed destructive instincts are suddenly reemerging

• How the death of religious faith has created a hopeless, morally unmoored Europe that clings to anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism, and other dangerous ideologies

• Why the notion of a united Europe is a fantasy and what that means for the United States

In the end, these are not separate issues. Berlinski provocatively demonstrates that Europe’s political and cultural crisis mirrors its profound moral and spiritual crisis.

But this is not just Europe’s problem. Menace in Europe makes clear that the spiritual void at the heart of Europe is ultimately our problem too. And America will pay a terrible price if we continue to ignore it.


From the Hardcover edition..
Price: $8.61 [Notify me when price goes down.]

After sending her résumé to the CIA on a whim, New Yorker Selena Keller is contacted by an Agency recruiter, who asks her how she would feel about convincing another human being to commit treason Despite her checkered past, Selena passes the background investigation and a battery of bizarre aptitude tests. Living under cover as a government budget analyst, she begins her education in espionage at the Farm, the CIA’s covert facility.

All CIA officers must survive a demanding training program, and it is there that Selena becomes romantically involved with Stan, a brilliant but darkly paranoid fellow student with presidential ambitions. What happens next is a fascinating inside portrait of the Agency—how spies are recruited, how they are trained, who they meet, where they go, and most important . . . what happens when they fall in love, and begin spying on one another..
Price: $3.87 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Simply put, an algorithm is a set of instructions-it's the code that makes computers run. A basic idea that proved elusive for hundreds of years and bent the minds of the greatest thinkers in the world, the algorithm is what made the modern world possible. Without the algorithm, there would have been no computer, no Internet, no virtual reality, no e-mail, or any other technological advance that we rely on every day.
In The Advent of the Algorithm, David Berlinski combines science, history, and math to explain and explore the intriguing story of how the algorithm was finally discovered by a succession of mathematicians and logicians, and how this paved the way for the digital age. Beginning with Leibniz and culminating in the middle of the twentieth century with the groundbreaking work of Gödel and Turing, The Advent of the Algorithm is an epic tale told with clarity and imaginative brilliance.

.
Price: $3.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In Infinite Ascent, David Berlinski, the acclaimed author of The Advent of the Algorithm, A Tour of the Calculus, and Newton’s Gift, tells the story of mathematics, bringing to life with wit, elegance, and deep insight a 2,500-year-long intellectual adventure.

Berlinski focuses on the ten most important breakthroughs in mathematical history–and the men behind them. Here are Pythagoras, intoxicated by the mystical significance of numbers; Euclid, who gave the world the very idea of a proof; Leibniz and Newton, co-discoverers of the calculus; Cantor, master of the infinite; and Gödel, who in one magnificent proof placed everything in doubt.

The elaboration of mathematical knowledge has meant nothing less than the unfolding of human consciousness itself. With his unmatched ability to make abstract ideas concrete and approachable, Berlinski both tells an engrossing tale and introduces us to the full power of what surely ranks as one of the greatest of all human endeavors.


From the Hardcover edition..
Price: $6.90 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Claire Berlinski (the real Claire Berlinski, that is) wrote Loose Lips, the best (and certainly the funniest) contemporary novel about the CIA. Of course, that never meant she was the greatest spy of her generation.

When a fictional spy novelist named Claire Berlinski, who lives in Paris, begins exchanging e-mails with an Iranian archeologist who likes her work, she thinks nothing of it. Lots of people like spy novels. Lots of people meet online. Lots of people flirt online.

But when Claire visits Istanbul at the suggestion of this charming Persian, whom she calls the Lion, she finds herself, to her astonishment, in the thick of a real espionage novel. As life begins menacingly to imitate art, Claire discovers that the Lion is not who she thinks he is. And the Lion discovers that Claire is not who he thinks she is, either..
Price: $4.88 [Notify me when price goes down.]