Rating: 
Summary: A Beautiful Book
Review: Just such a pleasure to read! I couldn't put it down. I really liked the author's description of university life in the 1950's, how each had its own culture, and how John Nash did, or did not, fit in. Her quote on the Nobel acceptance speech was itself worth the price of the book. One year after reading this book, I'm still smiling.
Rating:
Summary: a beautiful mind
Review: Excellent Book! Very interesting and moving. Tells the story of one the 20th century's greatest mathematicians. Amust read for anyone faintly interested in math.
Rating:
Summary: A clear an interesting presentation
Review: John Nash was brilliant. He also thought he was the emperor of Antarctica. Read this book to find out out how genius and madness can be intertwined like strands of a rope. I wonder if Nash believes his unbelievable mathematical ability was somehow related to an unusual brain that was also prone to schizophrenia? People who like A Beautiful Mind will also like Cliff Pickover's book "Strange Brains and Genius: The Secret Lives of Eccentric Scientists and Madmen."
Rating:
Summary: A suberb (factual) tale of an increadible man
Review: Gripping, emotional, fascinating and suberbly written. This book is an increadible story of a brilliant man, a pioneer in game theory, who became a very troubled schitzophrenic, and amazingly recovered from the disorder to come back and win the nobel prize in 1994. Whether or not you are familiar with game theory or John Nash, this is a powerful look in to the life of a brilliant man, his battle with a terrible disorder, and the burdens it brought upon his family and those around him. It is superbly written, hard to put down, educational and informative in many ways. 10 stars!
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting book.
Review: I don't know maybe I just have read too many biographies of scientists and mathematicians but this book didn't offer me what I wanted. Compared to books about Feynman,Erdos, Szilard this book is too pale.The writer treats the first few chapters with good touch although nothing remarkable but later she becomes too involved with schizophrenia and its varieties ! If I wanted to know what is schizophrenia I rather get a medical book. I was much interested in how Nash's life was affected. His mathematics is virtually untouched ! Nor were there any responses of other great mathematicians in the book barring a few. I wanted to know his contemporaries' views on his maths. As encountered in Erdos's biography the man's profession made him famous so let's have a look at it..otherwise I can line-up hundreds of schizophrenics and write their unusal biographies. Altogether not a bad book, but I'd prefer a more thorough approach towards his professional life too and his results in economics for which he got Nobel, not just his life as a schizophrenic
Rating:
Summary: Deeply satisfying
Review: How do you capture the strange without making it either freakish or mundane? This book does it. It also conveys the essence of the mathematics without becoming arcane or trivial. The account of Princeton in the late 1940's is superb.
Rating:
Summary: A book for all seasons and conditions of men.
Review: For spirited comments on the general thread of this book about John Nash, our 1994 Nobel Laureate in economics, please read some of the excellent reviews following. This review speaks to the "extras" you get from "A Beautiful Mind" by Sylvia Nasar: (1) Rarely do we get such a detailed and gripping look at schizophrenia as it seizes and systematically debilitates its victim. Here the reader can watch bizarre behavior develop and, later, slowly fade away to what, incredibly, appears to be a happy return to health, a blessing almost never accorded schizophrenics. (2) Scenes at Carnegie Tech, Princeton, and MIT give the reader the chance to compare memories of his college days to what he sees happening to and around John Nash in these great institutitons. Also, the reader gets intriguing sketches of business life inside the RAND Corporation, a think tank devoted to the secret concerns of the Air Force. (3) We also see inside a private mental institution, and later (when the family's money was running low) inside a state mental institution -- yesteryear's dreaded "insane asylum" complete with electroshock equipment. So the reader closes the book knowing a great deal more of a variety of subjects than might be expected from the title. Sylvia Nasar documents the book throughout with "Notes" collected in 48 pages of 7-point type at the end of the book. Some are fascinating in their own right. One was Nash's autobiography, required by the Nobel committee. The reader may wish the whole work had been included as an appendix. Nasar has written an amazingly penetrating portrait of a difficult and complex man. If she some day is awarded a Nobel for literature, this reviewer will not object.
Rating:
Summary: Intriguing biography
Review: What a fine line between genius and madness!! The book was a maze of theoretical math at the opening but this as well as his life was the setting for this madness and his journey in and out of the world of the sane. Nash had an uncommon mind and was placed in some very common settings. It is also a real indictment of the American's inability to deal with real genius when it surfaces. What a sad ending for such a mind and the lack of human spirit which accompanied it throughout it's lifetime.
Rating: 
Summary: Engaging Biography
Review: While I wasn't gripped by this biography until about a third of the way through, when it grabbed my attention it did so powerfully. While I agree with the reviewer below who suggests that this is not the book to read if you're interested exclusively in the the technical features of Nash's mathematical contributions, I believe that this criticism is misplaced. The book (it seems to me) is intended for an intelligent lay audience; it doesn't pretend to be a survey of his scientific accomplishments and failures. I was especially struck by the truly immense amount of competition that exists among math scholars for status. Although portraying this competition is hardly the principal aim of Nasar's beautiful book, she conveys the intensity of the struggle among scholars for recognition with impressive clarity and perspective.
Rating:
Summary: A wonderful tribute to a suffering servant to science
Review: The book was gripping all the way through. The story of a genius who descended into the Hades of madness and came to the light of life again, moved me. It moved me to tears to see the loyalty of the few friends and the woman who truly loved him, continue to support him and help him back to recovery through the 'wilderness' years. This book offers to those who suffer with mental illness, and the effects of it on family and friends, a book that inspires hope and strength in the face of adversity. I definitely recommend Sylvia Nasar's book that paints a plausible, true to life account of a man who suffered being much underestimated in his life - that he won a Noble Prize shows despite much personal suffering, how the lowly can be exalted , as though by God, to much public acclaim. A wonderful book.
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