Title: Excellent ideas, buried under bad prose
Product review: Berlinski gathered the right set of ideas for this subject, and he explains them in thorough detail. In particular, I found the level of detail for Godel's, Church's, and Turing's work to be very informative, e.g. this was the first time I saw Godel's encoding scheme explained well enough for me to see just how it works.However, the prose in this book was so bad that I just couldn't finish it. While it was good that he stayed away from a dry textbook style, the style he ended up with was better suited for a romance novel than a technical history. In addition to the prose style itself, the book is littered with fictional asides that are meant to illustrate subtle points but end up being a distraction. It seems that the author was trying to create both a good technical history and a work of art, but in the end he failed at both.
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