Rating: 
Summary: I love this book
Review: Strange Brains and Genius shows that there is little separation between science and topics that provoke interesting conversations at parties. The topics in this unique book are interesting to scientists and nonscientists. The format is curious, too. The author starts each chapter with a "fact file," so you get an overview of the various people's lives in the book. A few of my friends have read the book, and I found that no two people read the book in quite the same way. This book provides fascinating, though brief, accounts of the life of geniuses that sometimes read like a quirky novel. Enthralling.
Rating:
Summary: I love this book
Review: Strange Brains and Genius shows that there is little separation between science and topics that provoke interesting conversations at parties. The topics in this unique book are interesting to scientists and nonscientists. The format is curious, too. The author starts each chapter with a "fact file," so you get an overview of the various people's lives in the book. A few of my friends have read the book, and I found that no two people read the book in quite the same way. This book provides fascinating, though brief, accounts of the life of geniuses that sometimes read like a quirky novel. Enthralling.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting
Review: The book is clear and gets the point across. It goes in details beyond the title and that's what makes it interesting. One of the geniuses the author picked is the "Unabomber". It was a very interesting chapter to read.
Rating:
Summary: Fun and profound
Review: The chapter on Nicola Tesla provides a superb example of the excellence in this book - both fun to read and profound. Every day computers users turn on their beloved machines to perform technical calculations, process words, and to create e-mail, all made possible in part by Tesla and his contributions to electricity - especially alternating currents. Today his name lives on as the unit for magnetic flux density and as the name of a heavy metal rock band. Here was a man who for several decades engaged in vast numbers of scientific experiments which brought him fame and fortune, and yet in his later years his memories consisted mainly of events from childhood, and he spent his time brooding over pigeons in the New York City hotel rooms in which he lived. Dr. Pickover's account of Tesla's feud with Thomas Edison - another strange brain - certainly reveals some unusual cranial activity on the part of Edison. Throughout the book we have serious scholarship in the material on temporal lobe epilepsy, sertonin, bipolar disorder (manic depression), and the recently developed biochemistry of schizophrenia along with chronicles of the brilliant achievements of these strange brains. Appropriately, Pickover devotes an entire chapter to mathematician and Unabomber Ted Kaczynski. "Blessed are the cracked, for they shall let in the light." Maybe it's true. Maybe genius and creativity are closely related to madness. If you read "Strange Brains and Genius" you will have a lot of fun and a lot to think about. Dennis W. Gordon Madison, WI END
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting information, but poorly organized book.
Review: This was a book I had high expectations for, and it didn't meet them. After coming off of reading several books on creativity in artists and manic-depression (bipolar disorder), reading about John Nash, and Oliver Sack's interesting boyhood...I was very intrigued by the thought of reading about strange scientists. I'd met so many that almost fit that category just at my university, who were obsessive about their science (especially the 'fly' guys! and the computer/artificial intelligence/robot geeks), that in reading this book I recognized more of this behavior than I thought existed originally. The book has great information, but I was extremely disappointed over the organization of the book. It's like someone did all this research on individuals and the things that intrigued him about intelligence, then just pasted in the chapters with no thought to how the book should be organized. Most other books give an explanation or definition of the conditions he is talking about...kind of a guideline of what to look for first before dealing with individuals. Or they look at specific disorders and bring up individuals who went overboard in these areas. When you start reading the book, you think "Oh...this is individual chapters about men with scientific genius (no women included...why?), and then the author tells you in the middle of his chapters that he will explain more about particular problems/disorders in Chapter so-and-so. It's like he doesn't have enough confidence you will read to the end, so he kind of puts a carrot in front of the audience. Not smart to treat your potential audience as maybe being less than intelligent! The setup of the chapters were annoying. The author would give "The Straight Dope"--info on what these men accomplished, and then a section on "Strange Brains", the idiosyncracies and eccentricities of their lives. I guess I should have been more prepared for this by the rather odd choice for the frontpiece of the book. Though I was not expecting a textbook, I did think it was a serious topic. Yet, it seems to be written for mass consumption along the lines of a celebrity tell-all that you would find in some hokey magazine. Most of these men were geniuses who magnified their callings in this world to the point of hurting themselves emotionally and socially. They couldn't help it because they lived in times where their disorder was not treatable as a physical disorder of the brain. If it were treatable, the question always arises...would their genius be altered because their obsession could be controlled? This is the current bioethical question on medicating even for things such as Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD/ADHD) to make children come into the norms of society and the control of teachers. I really questioned the addition of the Unabomber in comparison to the other entries. The rest did magnificent things, and their compulsions hurt themselves, but rarely others. Kaczynski on the other hand never achieved anything useable, and created things leading to havoc and death. Regardless of his supposed 'braininess', the Unabomber leaves the area of obsession-compulsions, and enters serious mental illness with his persecution complex and his psychotic behavior. A very large difference between him and the others in this book...and not one I would want my students to read about in classrooms. The rest of the chapters are haphazardly put together on IQ and other aspects of intelligence, information gleaned from web browsing and apparently, chat rooms on psychiatry....
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