Writings on computer science celebrate the passive voice, the obtuseformalism, the multitude of graphs with dashed and dotted and dashed-dottedlines and tiny legends. While sometimes of interest to researchers, thisliterature is entirely foreign to those outside that clique, not becausecomputers are irrelevant, but because the ideas behind the informationrevolution have been presented in an intentionally stilted and impersonalmanner.

The same enforced distance characterizes technical books. As Alan Lightmanobserves in the January 1999 issue of Atlantic Monthly, "Modern textbooks onscience give no sense that scientific ideas come out of the minds of humanbeings. Instead science is portrayed as a set of current laws and results, inscribed like the Ten Commandments by some immediate but disembodiedauthority."

Dennis Shasha and Cathy Lazere break from that tradition in their compellingbook entitled "Out of Their Minds, The Lives and Discoveries of 15 GreatComputer Scientists". Here we find that, unlike mathematics and theoreticalphysics, for which intellectual breakthroughs generally are made by the veryyoung, "Rabin invented randomized algorithms in his forties; McCarthyinvented nonmonotonic logics in his fifties, Backus worked on functionallanguages and Dijkstra developed new methods for mathematical proofs intheir sixties." We come to understand that Danny Hillis' fascination ofneuroanatomy provided telling analogies for his work on massively parallelmachines. We are surprised that Stephen Cook did not foresee the widespreadapplicability of NP-Completeness, that John Backus thought Fortran might beuseful for a single IBM machine model, rather than as the first trulyplatform-independent programming language. We get caught up in theadrenaline of Alan Kay's design of Smalltalk, simplifying it until acomplete definition could fit on one page; the intrigue of makingconnections between disparate fields, as Leslie Lamport did between specialrelativity and distributed systems; the frustration of the initialdisparagement by those who didn't understand the insight or itsimplications, as John McCarthy experienced when he published his firstserious paper on artificial intelligence.

Shasha and Lazere's book will be of interest to scientists and nonscientistsalike: they give enough of the background of the discoveries to make themunderstandable to the general public, while providing the fascinating humancontext and involvement so missing from other sources. "Out of Their Minds"is just the right mix of biography and science, highly readable, andastonishing in its breadth. It is a wonderful book, full of wonder.