FACULTY BOOKS

A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines

By Janna Levin ’88

Awarded an honorable mention by the 2007 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award and the 2007 L.L. Windship/PEN New England Awards. In this remarkable work of fiction, astrophysicist Janna Levin reimagines the lives of two of the most important and influential minds of our time. The narrator is a scientist herself, a physicist obsessed with Kurt Gödel, the greatest logician of many centuries, and with Alan Turing, the extraordinary mathematician, breaker of the Enigma Code during World War II. “They are both brilliantly original and outsiders,” the narrator tells us. “They are both besotted with mathematics. But for all their devotion, mathematics is indifferent, unaltered by any of their dramas . . . Against indifference, I want to tell their stories.” Which she does in a haunting, incantatory voice, the two lives unfolding in parallel narratives that overlap in the magnitude of each man’s achievement and demise: Gödel, delusional and paranoid, would starve himself to death; Turing, arrested for homosexual activities, would be driven to suicide. And they meet as well in the narrator’s mind, where facts are interwoven with her desire and determination to find meaning in the maze of their stories: two men devoted to truth of the highest abstract nature, yet unable to grasp the mundane truths of their own lives. A unique amalgam of luminous imagination and richly evoked historic character and event—A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines is a story about the pursuit of truth and its effect on the lives of two men. A story of genius and madness, incredible yet true.

The War on Terrorism and the Rule of Law

By Richard M. Pious

Pious' book provides a detailed discussion of due process issues invoked by the George W. Bush administration's war on terror.

This book questions the premise that the government's obligation to protect Americans from terrorist acts leads to an inevitable tradeoff between constitutional and legal guarantees of due process. Instead, Pious argues that bringing terrorists to justice through the due process of law provides more rather than less security.

The introductory chapter begins by laying out worst-case scenarios for terrorist attacks on the United States. Case studies of recent court cases document that when law enforcement takes shortcuts it may not only result in the imprisonment of innocent people, but also distorts or falsifies the intelligence needed to deploy law enforcement resources in the most efficient manner. Subsequent chapters apply this perspective to such topics as government surveillance (including warrantless surveillance), data-mining, immigration "hold and clear" hearings, the application of material support and material witness statutes, rules of evidence determining access to witnesses, the indefinite detention of American citizens and non-citizens, the use of military hearings, and the authorized and unauthorized mistreatment of detainees to obtain intelligence.

Pious provides accessible, up-to-date materials such as testimony and speeches by Bush administration officials presenting their arguments for an "intelligence-driven" approach rather than a due process approach to combat terrorism, congressional testimony refuting these claims, proposed legislation to require adherence to due process of law, recent statute law delegating extensive power to government officials, and federal cases attempting to strike a balance between governmental prerogative claims and the rights of defendants. The cases have been extensively edited to make them accessible to undergraduate students and other non-lawyers.

The author provides extensive commentaries and notes, some of which are based on his own research, and others that present alternative viewpoints. These are designed to stimulate students, organize class discussion, and point out further avenues of research and inquiry.

Suggested readings at the end of the book provide students with a preliminary bibliography for short essays or longer research papers.

Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution

By Caroline Weber

Marie Antoinette has always stood as an icon of supreme style, but surprisingly none of her biographers have paid sustained attention to her clothes. In Queen of Fashion, Caroline Weber shows how Marie Antoinette developed her reputation for fashionable excess, and explains through lively, illuminating new research the political controversies that her clothing provoked. Weber surveys Marie Antoinette's "Revolution in Dress," covering each phase of the queens tumultuous life, beginning with the young girl, struggling to survive Versailles's rigid traditions of royal glamour (twelve-foot-wide hoopskirts, whalebone corsets that crushed her organs). As queen, Marie Antoinette used stunning, often extreme costumes to project an image of power and wage war against her enemies. Gradually, however, she began to lose her hold on the French when she started to adopt "unqueenly" outfits (the provocative chemise) that, surprisingly, would be adopted by the revolutionaries who executed her. Weber's queen is sublime, human, and surprising: a sometimes courageous monarch unwilling to allow others to determine her destiny. The paradox of her tragic story, according to Weber, is that fashion — the vehicle she used to secure her triumphs — was also the means of her undoing. Webers book is not only a stylish and original addition to Marie Antoinette scholarship, but also a moving, revelatory reinterpretation of one of historys most controversial figures.

Bodies, Commodities, and Biotechnologies: Death, Mourning, and Scientific Desire in the Realm of Human Organ Transfer

by Lesley A. Sharp

Organ transfer is rich terrain to investigate—especially in the American context, where sophisticated technological interventions have significantly shaped understandings of health and well-being, suffering, and death. In Bodies, Commodities, and Biotechnologies, Lesley Sharp probes the ideological assumptions underlying the transfer of body parts, the social significance of donors' deaths, and the medico-scientific desires surrounding complex forms of body repair. Sharp also considers the experimental realm, in which nonhuman species and artificial devices present further opportunities for recovery and for controversy.

A compelling scientific investigation and social critique, Bodies, Commodities, and Biotechnologies explores the pervasive, and at times pernicious, practices shaping American biomedicine in the twenty-first century.

Strange Havest: Organ Transplants, Denatured Bodies, and the Transformed Self

by Lesley A. Sharp

Strange Harvest illuminates the wondrous yet disquieting medical realm of organ transplantation by drawing on the voices of those most deeply involved: transplant recipients, clinical specialists, and the surviving kin of deceased organ donors. In this rich and deeply engaging ethnographic study, anthropologist Lesley Sharp explores how these parties think about death, loss, and mourning, especially in light of medical taboos surrounding donor anonymity. As Sharp argues, new forms of embodied intimacy arise in response, and the riveting insights gleaned from her interviews, observations, and descriptions of donor memorials and other transplant events expose how patients and donor families make sense of the transfer of body parts from the dead to the living. For instance, all must grapple with complex yet contradictory clinical assertions of death as easily detectable and absolute; nevertheless, transplants are regularly celebrated as forms of rebirth, and donors as living on in others' bodies. New forms of sociality arise, too: recipients and donors' relatives may defy sanctions against communication, and through personal encounters strangers are transformed into kin. Sharp also considers current experimental research efforts to develop alternative sources for human parts, with prototypes ranging from genetically altered animals to sophisticated mechanical devices. These future trajectories generate intriguing responses among both scientists and transplant recipients as they consider how such alternatives might reshape established–yet unusual–forms of embodied intimacy.