Rating: 
Summary: A Complex Story
Review: There has been a great deal of comparison between the book and film versions of A Beautiful Mind. I read the book, then saw the movie, and the changes, often seemingly gratuitous, are jarring. But my husband and son, "uncontaminated" by a previous reading, both thuoght it a very good movie. Each tells the truth, one with an obviously more literal meaning of "truth" (i.e., the book), but if anyone out there bleieves all written biographies to be pure truth, please come check out some bridges I have for sale.Nonethelesss, the book's truth is also the more complex one, and is so in a way I have only seen indirectly treated. The book's treatment of the academic world is quite dense, and perhaps often unnecessarily so, but it really is the central story. I don't see Nash's story as primarily a love story, although obviously that is an important part of his story. I see the academic story as central, and in very different and complicated ways. First, it was the competitiveness and arrogance of the academic elite that undid Nash, his own personality complicit in his downfall. But secondly, his own personality again, and the very same elite academic community, as tolerant of oddity as it is competitive, facilitated Nash's long road to recovery. Schizophrenics retain their personalities within their illness; finding safe niches matter to all of them, and is the challenge in today's move to community placement of schizophrenics. Nash was a pioneer in Game Theory first, and then a pioneer in his own successful community placement. His genius, his beautiful mind, need the full telling only a book can provide. Nash is not only a schizophrenic Nobel Laureate, but a member of the academic community. His is quite a tale. Only a book can truly tell it.
Rating:
Summary: One Beautiful Mind Deserves Another
Review: If you liked the movie, you will love this book. Sylvia Nasar's superb biography takes us well beyond the film version, which, in slightly more than two hours, could only do so much. Here you will experience the rich detail of Nash's life explored by a writer of consummate skill. Nasar's prose paints marvelous pictures of Nash, his family, his quandaries, academia, departments of mathematics here and abroad, and, of course, Princeton itself (I once lived nearby). Nash was indeed a tormented soul, trapped as he was by schizophrenia, aptly termed a "cancer of the mind." Unable to develop and maintain relationships with others -- not uncommonly characteristic of genius -- he turned inward and found himself lost in the labyrinths of a frightening inner sanctum. If names like Godel, von Neumann, and Norbert Weiner are already familiar to you, you will appreciate the way in which Nasar brings them (and Einstein) to life with colorful anecdotes drawn from the reminiscences of those who knew them. This is an excellent book -- one as others have written will teach you about many things. One beautiful mind found another when Sylvia Nasar chose to write about John Forbes Nash, Jr. I, for one, am grateful that she did.
Rating:
Summary: Fascinating
Review: The movie was fascinating, but the book far more so. In addition to giving us a detailed biography of Nash, Nasar also creates a vivid picture of the rarefied academic atmosphere at Princeton, MIT and the Institute for Advanced Studies. She captures the feeling of the times, from the immediate post-war era through the Cold War years and McCarthyism. The reader is led to consider questions of sexuality, morality, genius, madness and human nature, as well as game theory and mathematics. In response to another reviewer's question about something puzzling in the writing, the problem may lie in the way chapters open. In some cases, a chapter seems to begin with an anecdote that is meant to give an overview, a kind of generalization, and then the story backtracks and leads up to that incident. It's a common enough technique, but in places I found it awkwardly handled. But for the most part I found her writing elegant and clear and the incorporation of multiple sources very skillfully done. One other thought that strikes me is that the possibility of reconstructing someone's life in such detail is interesting in itself. Suppose your life was thought to be of interest to others; could a good researcher put together a biography of you that was far more clear and detailed than even your own memory of it? If you are interested in math, or psychology, or feminism, or history, or economics, or just humanity, you will find value in this book. (PS: I just read about Asperger's Syndrome and am inclined to wonder whether this may account for Nash's peculiar behavior prior to his descent into schizophrenia. Nash's apparent arrogance and cruelty may be the result of an inability to understand human interaction, I could speculate.)
Rating:
Summary: engrossing bio
Review: I must admit, I saw the movie first - and ran out for the book immediately! I loved the book, especially how Nasar wove together the essential elements of context, timing, location. There was enough description of the science involved to give mathematically challenged a sense of what was at stake. Nasar did a good job of describing so much of the U.S. during the 50's and 60's: the various academic environments, the state of psychiatric research and treatment, the paranoia of the cold war, the social mores in play, the economic environment, the political climate.... And all of that was just background to the main attraction: the life of John Nash. Thinking now of the movie, I'm impressed with the really good job they did getting it right. It shouldn't matter to anyone that the details were not the same - it wasn't a documentary, after all. But the movie captured the emotion and energy, like a good impressionist painting. I recommend the book and the movie!
Rating: 
Summary: Not good for non-math majors
Review: I enjoyed this book. I really did. But often the biographer got bogged down in mathematical principles that I, as an English major, simply could not understand, which left me feeling very frustrated. And while the first 3/4ths of the book I felt were pretty clear, once he moves to Paris, I frankly started feeling muddled, and it only became exacerbated the more I trucked on. It is a truly inspiring story about a truly great man, but I think it could have been handled better for the pathetic math impaired, like me.
Rating: 
Summary: Solid research, wide scope
Review: There seem to be people who are trying to judge this book *against* the movie, which is plainly ridiculous. The book came first, and it is one of the most un-filmable books I've ever read (unless you turn and twist the facts as the movie-makers chose to). So, let us not be deceived: there is almost nothing in common between Nasar's biography and the Hollywood film, and someone suggested to the point that the movie should have been called something like "A Wonderful Brain" and the main character (very convincingly, I must admit, played by Russel Crowe) should never be called John Nash. The book is not just about Nash; it is about a whole epoch in American science, in academic life of the country, about the realities of the cold-war frenzy as reflected in university life, in the intricacies of the Nobel-prize-winning system. It is wonderfully researched, accessibly written (I cannot understand the maths behind the story - but so, I guess, cannot Ms. Nasar; we both have to take the specialists' word for it). The forays into psychiatry are also fascinating. It could be a little shorter; and having the potential of a real page-turner, it never becomes one; but it comes comfortably close. Just forget the movie, will you?
Rating:
Summary: A Frustrating Read
Review: I picked this book up to read on my flight home. Skimming through tht first few pages of the Prologue, I was not surprised to find out that the movie screen writers had chosen to dramatize, fabricate or omit certain elements. But the content of the book or the movie is not what I am reviewing. Sylvia Nasar chose to include too much detail in her sentences, to the extent that they did not flow. More often than not, she would tack on useless trivia or personal opinions - that don't add to the reading experience, and frankly I don't care about! - interrupting the reader's train of thought. Unlike a previous review, I would've appreciated the author including the details as footnotes instead of forcing them into the sentences. Otherwise, it was a very informative book, with interesting background on the recruitment of foreign scientists and mathematicians to the United States.
Rating: 
Summary: Not That Beautiful
Review: This is the story of mathematical genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash. It traces his origins in the small town of Bluefield, West Virginia, to his education at Carnegie Tech., to graduate work at Princeton, all the way to winning the Nobel Prize in economics for his work in the area of game theory. Yet the path to fortune is not so easy, by the time he was in his thirties, Nash was battling severe schizophrenia, which forced him to be involuntarily hospitalized five times, and get divorced from his loving and devoted wife Alicia. In the end, it is only with the support of the mathematics community at Princeton, and the fierce loyalty of his wife, Alicia, that he seemed able to gain control of his brilliant yet ailing mind and return to the world of mathematics. Do not be deceived. This books is positively nothing like the movie. Director Ron Howard elected to leave out various elements of John Nash's life including: his extreme and unpitiable arrogance, his bisexuality, his arrest for indecent exposure, the mistress and son whom he abandoned, his divorce from his wife, his frequent flights to Europe, and his own son's schizophrenia. Frankly, I did not enjoy reading this book very much because a lot of it was dry and boring and hard to understand. It dealt with a lot of mathematics which I had difficulty figuring out, and I still have difficulty pin-pointing exactly what John Nash won the prize for. This book was very technical and the first one hundred and sixty pages simply described campuses and the lives of other mathematicians, whom Nash may have walked by once in his life. The parts about his schizophrenia were more interesting, but the book was hard to get engaged in. I also found it annoying the way it seemed as though virtually every other sentence had a footnote after it. You almost felt like screaming at the author, "Did you write any of this yourself!" It was a book that was written in a very scholarly way, but it was very inaccessible to a lay-person. It was very long and spent more time going over facts and figures, than people's actual personalities. The ending was very sweet and poignant, but it did not make up for the exhaustion of reading this book. If you are interested in math and economics, then this is a book worth checking out. However, if you just want to read something that ties into the movie, don't bother, you will only end up frustrated.
Rating:
Summary: Beautiful Book
Review: A Beautiful Book. I haven't seen the movie, but after reading this book and discussing it with a friend who saw the movie, the movie appears to have taken the basic "idea" of John Nash's life and made movie which is more fiction than reality. So i think i'd rather not watch the movie. In every page of the book you can see the imense amount of research Nasar went into writing this biography - which i'm sure the movie would not do justice to. However, the book is well written, exciting, entertaining and though provoking. I always love a book that makes you think. It makes you understand what is going on in the mind of a genius. The book also makes you understand the interesting world of game theory, and gives a real account of pycsaphranic patient (Hollywood always loves to give false realties of everything).
Rating:
Summary: A Beautiful Mind - a good bio
Review: I listened to an unabridged recording (Audible.com) before I saw the movie... This is a well-researched and well-written book on John Nash. There is some digression into the culture of academia, but that's the environment in which the subject existed. While the text provides some good insight into his mental illness, it is not necessarily a comprehensive discussion of it.
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