Maniacs Vision

Named One of the 10 Best Books of 2023 by The Washington Post and Publishers Weekly • One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2023 • A National Bestseller • A New York Times Editor's Choice pick • Nominated for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction “Captivating and unclassifiable, at once a historical novel and a philosophical foray . . . Labatut is a writer of thrilling originality. The MANIAC is a work of dark, eerie and singular beauty.” —The Washington Post “Darkly absorbing . . . A brooding, heady narrative that is addictively interesting.” —Wall Street Journal From one of contemporary literature’s most exciting new voices, a haunting story centered on the Hungarian polymath John von Neumann, tracing the impact of his singular legacy on the dreams and nightmares of the twentieth century and the nascent age of AI Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World electrified a global readership. A Booker Prize and National Book Award finalist, and one of the New York Times’ Ten Best Books of the Year, it explored the life and thought of a clutch of mathematicians and physicists who took science to strange and sometimes dangerous new realms. In The MANIAC, Labatut has created a tour de force on an even grander scale. A prodigy whose gifts terrified the people around him, John von Neumann transformed every field he touched, inventing game theory and the first programable computer, and pioneering AI, digital life, and cellular automata. Through a chorus of family members, friends, colleagues, and rivals, Labatut shows us the evolution of a mind unmatched and of a body of work that has unmoored the world in its wake. The MANIAC places von Neumann at the center of a literary triptych that begins with Paul Ehrenfest, an Austrian physicist and friend of Einstein, who fell into despair when he saw science and technology become tyrannical forces; it ends a hundred years later, in the showdown between the South Korean Go Master Lee Sedol and the AI program AlphaGo, an encounter embodying the central question of von Neumann's most ambitious unfinished project: the creation of a self-reproducing machine, an intelligence able to evolve beyond human understanding or control. A work of beauty and fabulous momentum, The MANIAC confronts us with the deepest questions we face as a species.

"Maniac Eyeball" contains the frank and uncensored confessions of Salvador Dalí, from his childhood and first adolescent sexual experiences to his emergence as a painter, Surrealist, and eventually the most famous - and possibly richest -artist of modern times. These inspired tracts, covering art, love, money, sex and death, fame, philosophy, science, his famous friends and enemies, and his extraordinary creative genius, reveal the intricate workings of Dalí's mind to create not only an unparalleled autobiography but also one of the key Surrealist texts yet published. This special ebook edition contains colour illustrations.

"This important study explores the medicalization of alcohol abuse in the 19th century US” and its influence on American literature and popular culture (Choice). In Rum Maniacs, Matthew Warner Osborn examines the rise of pathological drinking as a subject of medical interest, social controversy, and lurid fascination in 19th century America. At the heart of that story is the disease that afflicted Edgar Allen Poe: delirium tremens. Poe’s alcohol addiction was so severe that it gave him hallucinations, such as his vivid recollection of standing in a prison cell, fearing for his life, as he watched men mutilate his mother’s body—an event that never happened. First described in 1813, delirium tremens and its characteristic hallucinations inspired sweeping changes in how the medical profession saw and treated the problems of alcohol abuse. Based on new theories of pathological anatomy, human physiology, and mental illness, the new diagnosis established the popular belief that habitual drinking could become a psychological and physiological disease. By midcentury, delirium tremens had inspired a wide range of popular theater, poetry, fiction, and illustration. This romantic fascination endured into the twentieth century, most notably in the classic Disney cartoon Dumbo, in which a pink pachyderm marching band haunts a drunken young elephant. Rum Maniacs reveals just how delirium tremens shaped the modern experience of alcohol addiction as a psychic struggle with inner demons.

This is a comprehensive reading of Shelley's oeuvre through the lens of developments in literary and psychoanalytic theory. The author provides though-provoking readings of well-known works and also explores less familiar pieces.

A horror suspense novelist gets lost in the grey zone between fiction and reality when real murders of young women appear copied from his latest, still unfinished manuscript. Someone is murdering female students at a university in northern England. Among the victims is a Swedish girl. Kenneth Sorin, a chemical physics doctor and horror suspense novelist, starts his own murky murder investigation with the help of his cat and his new mysterious girlfriend. The girlfriend turns out to be a spy and secret agent for SCDX, a shadowy international law enforcement organisation. Meanwhile, Kenneth receives strange telephone calls: an old lady who died ten years ago phones the author from her grave, encouraging him to look inside himself for the truth. The tracks lead Kenneth to the world of science and mysticism, including a meeting with a professor in Paris. He discovers bizarre elements in his own fiction writing. In addition, he happened to meet the Swedish girl twice: the same evening she was stabbed to death, and a year earlier, in connection with a trip to Sweden. Could he be the killer himself? Is the author a psychotic fictional character who stepped out of his own book?

If you are looking for a strong point of view that boosts the optimists' side of commodities trading, this is it. But Kevin Kerr's assurance that you can make money by trading commodities does not take into account the real risks involved, and could mislead potential traders. The truth is that the odds are stacked strongly against any investor, particularly in the now nearly-extinct open-outcry pit trading that Kerr discusses at length. However, his rundown of the basic facts about the commodities markets will give you a start in learning about this arcane investment science. getAbstract suggests that it may fit in as one among many texts you might want to study before jumping into the pit.