Book Reviews

The Brain Makers: Genius, Ego, and Greed in the Quest for Machines That Think, Harvey P. Newquist, Sams Publishing, Indianapolis, Indiana, 1994, 488 pp., $24.95, ISBN 0-672-30412-0. Newquist is a business reporter who covered the field during the 1980s when academic researchers went commercial in one of the 1980's smaller speculative bubbles. His book begins with a history spanning Babbage to Turing to Minsky, McCarthy, Newell, Simon, Samuel, and others at the 1956 Dartmouth meeting and moves on to the 1980s, where the real story begins. Good, if glib, descriptions of people, places, and events are punctuated by technical explanations ranging from poor to inane. Because I am a little slow, it took me a quarter of the book to recognize a journalist with an attitude.