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Summary: Interested in your own potential for genius?
Review: Nash was a highly capable man and has lived a remarkably hard life. This biography gives great insight into how genius is formed. A simple yet laser-like focus will bring great mental ability to us all - Nash is living, if tragic, proof. "The Child Whisperer", a book about communicating with children, was written by a man with a lot of experience challenging the belief that IQ can not be improved in substantial ways. Get "a Beautiful Mind" and "The Child Whisperer" and make some discoveries about genius that you can use.
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Summary: The fine line that separates brilliance & insanity
Review: I originally bought this book to write an extra credit report for a Master's Programme Stats class. I could not imagine the life of a mathematician could provide 4 pages of interesting reading let alone 429 pages. I could not have been more wrong. I read the book in one week. Every minute I had between work and school I read. The book really gives you a sense of what John Nash felt, when he was curious, when he showed true genius and when he was isolated from the world.
I never realised so many of our great mathmatic minds had shared the same time & space. John Nash was truly a brilliant paradox.
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Summary: Well-Documented, Well-Written Biography
Review: Sylvia Nasar offers an insight into the life and mind of John Forbes Nash,Jr., which I found fascinating. Having a background in psychology, I was curious about how she would touch upon his schizophrenia, and she does not disappoint. Very well-documented and well-presented. A great book, even if you're not into the biography genre.
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Summary: Excellent, but many anecdotes are missing
Review: The biography is well researched and manages to convey a feeling of what Princeton was like when Nash was a studenr--no mean feat. However, the book omits many fascinating and revealing anecdotes that the author's sources refused to tell the author--and I know what they are!
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Summary: Maximum Involvement
Review: I was led to the book by a movie review in the NYT that said the movie did not tell the story of the book and that it was very serious and important story. I am writing this review because having read it I would like to discuss it.Though there is some redundancy in the text, I still read every word. The exploration of the themes of genius and acknowledged contributions, followed by more than 30 years of paranoid schizophrenia and then remission and recognition is gripping. The care of the biographer in acknowledging and noting her sources is very unusual for most popular and semi-popular biographers. That she took her subject and his work and his journey seriously is never in doubt. There is no pseudo psych. There is lots of exploration. The author explores very sensitive areas thou rally, but sensitively. Nash's homosexuality, his seeming contempt for people and their feelings nothing is left out. His forty-five year relationship with the woman who has been his wife is not a simple story and the author takes her time to present the facts. Still, she does not judge, she reports. I did enjoy the sections about Princeton and MIT and the world of mathematicians. An economics PhD candidate I had dinner with said, "I heard it's all about relationships and not mathematics". The mathematicians in the book say economics is not very serious math. (Nash seems to agree with that in an ironic way.) In short I was charmed by the book, it gave me a lot a material with which to consider the nature of genius, mathematical accomplishment, mental illness and (particularly the effect of other people on ones sense of self) and what is meant by a whole life. I understand that there is a lot of talk about love in the movie. In the book the word is not mentioned once-these are not touchy feely folk, still love and friendship are very important to the story. Read the book.
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Summary: A Challenging Book
Review: I read this book and the "notes" in the back, with a great deal of difficulty (I even researched "Reimann's Hypothesis" on the Net) and turned down corners of pages for discussion. However, I know of no one who has read it because it is a very complicated book with mathematic discussions. (I can balance a checkbook). The story was quite remarkable, the frightening medical treatment and the total sadness of Dr. Nash's younger son was difficult to read. It is good to know Dr. Nash is still alive after so many years of illness.
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Summary: A math phobic who loves this book
Review: Don't be concerned about the laboriousness of this book. I hated math in school- and still have nighmares about the last test I have to take- but this book was one I was sorry had to end. This is a book about the human condition and a truly great mind, and it has neither too much nor too little technical info in it. I recommend it highly.
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Summary: The Book That Inspired The Movie
Review: This book draws very sharp divisions between movies that are about a life, based on a life, or in this case, inspired by a life. Whether you have scene the movie or even the trailer, once you read this book it become immediately apparent Dr. Nash's life would not fit into any single film. To a degree this is simply an instance of practicality, for the work this man and his peers did, is intelligible to a small handful of people. Even while reading the book, unless your math skills are somewhat extraordinary, the lexicon of pure math will be completely new, and the concepts these men and women developed are fascinating, however they are almost unimaginably complex. To those who have read material that may have touched on Game Theory, The Prisoner's Dilemma, and The Mobius Band, the book will allow for moments when the inquisitive can participate. In most cases the concepts are mind bending, and in some cases they could not even be verbalized by some of the brilliant minds that Dr. Nash worked amongst. Ms. Sylvia Nasar does an excellent job of explaining why Dr. Nash was so different from his peers, and how he approached complex issues in fundamentally different manners than others. The remarkable story is of this brilliant man who was considered one of the greatest thinkers of his time who fell gradually, though fairly quickly, into a mental state that caused his family to commit him more than once. The decades he spent living under the most bizarre and destructive delusions, his moments of clarity, and then his highly unusual recovery makes for an incredible tale. This is one of those stories that had it been written as fiction, it would not have been taken seriously. The other parts of the book were very revealing as they pertained to Dr. Nash and his peers at Princeton, MIT, and elsewhere. The fields they work in are intensely competitive, however when he began his decline, and then continued to have false starts at normality, for the most part he was not abandoned. The author touches on why his peers may have felt the need to help a man who routinely demonstrated the most hurtful personal behavior to anyone he came in contact with. There were exceptions, but they are very few in number, and not for the people you might suppose. All of these great minds share at least one commonality, and that is their ability to think at extremely high levels that few can even imagine. Many of these people seem to constantly fear the loss of whatever unique gifts they have. They also tend to be people that have been marginalized until they find their place in the academic world, for what they think of, and the eccentricities they often have, single them out for ridicule not praise. A very readable biography, a profession that is understood by few.
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Summary: Warning -- not your typical biography
Review: It's likely that this book will attract a lot of new curiosity, from those who read, see or hear about the movie version of Nash's life. The problem is that this book may end up being more -- and less -- than most readers are seeking. Nasar tries too hard to please both expected types of readers: math majors and those attracted to the human interest element of schizophrenia. Her attention to detail is exhausting. She not only recounts every theory ever attributed to Nash, but pushes extensive detail on us about what every theory means. Probably every quotation ever made about Nash and his theories, regardless of whether or not it serves a point, is reprinted here. We're given background details about every work and school acquaintance that came into Nash's life, even though most of this information is unnecessary and detracts greatly from the central story. And when she's ready to tell us about Nash's employment period with the Rand Corporation, we must first read an entire chapter about the history of Rand and its founders, as well as many more exploratory pages about game theories. It must be noted that A Beautiful Mind can usually be found in the Math section of bookstores. This is no coincidence. In order to learn about, and understand, Nash as a human being, you must trudge through numerous, exhaustingly detailed math principles, and other unnecessary padding by Nasar. Yes, there's a very good story here, but for general biography fans, be forewarned that it is buried within about 200 pages of information which the publisher should have seen fit to excise.
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Summary: Plus and Minus
Review: Well - there may be more than you every wanted to know about John Nash in this biography. The positives include a very complete biography that is so well documented that it reads like an honors thesis, with hundreds of footnotes (which could have been omitted - we trust you Ms. Nasar!). One of the most interesting aspects for me was the "background" information on various locations in which John Nash: I enjoyed finding out about what it was like to be at MIT and Princeton in those years when Dr. Nash resided there - the universities, neighborhoods, and lifestyles were quite fascinating. I learned a lot about schizophrenia, too. On the negative side: I felt the book suffered from poor editing - it contains way too much detail. It seems like every conversation that anyone could every recall having had with Dr. Nash is documented in the book (with a footnote!). The author and editor should have resisted the temptation to include every bit of info. on every notecard that the author collected and should have concentrated more on the big picture.
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