A Beautiful Mind

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This is a challenging book, especially when approaching it on the foundation of having seen the Hollywood film of the same name. However, it is non... (show more)

This is a challenging book, especially when approaching it on the foundation of having seen the Hollywood film of the same name. However, it is nonetheless remarkable and fascinating. The author, Sylvia Nasar, is an economist, and at the risk of making a generalization, her writing style reads like an economist's. It is fairly dry for the most part. Nasar has done an impressive job of reconstructing the life of Nobel laureate and mathematician, John Nash, but has made the mistake of being too enamoured of her own research as to leave any of it out. As a result, we are given facts and perspective on people that, while interesting, are not wholly relevant to the story.

If you have seen the movie, you must realize that the script is a heavily fictionalized account of Nash's life. You should not let that dissuade you from an engrossing study of the schizophrenic mind and the lumbering attempts of 1950s era psychology to treat it. The accounts of insulin therapy remind me of Janet Frame's chilling accounts of shock therapy in her autobiography.

Nash was no absent-minded professor as a young man. Indeed, he was arrogant, abrasive, and egocentric, but undeniably one of the finest minds of his generation. In the space of a page of this work, the reader can feel the genuine loss as this mind unravels literally overnight. While the remission of his illness took much longer to unfold, mercifully he began to wake up from his delusions. The man who once thought he was the Emperor of Antarctica, a political refugee, and so many different personas, came to realize that he was not being sent secret messages through the New York Times or, indeed, his colleagues' talks.

Nash woke up to find that some 30-40 years of his life were gone. In the debris of his own hubris, and the seemingly random cruelty of schizophrenia, he reclaimed a simple life, and began to establish the connections to the world of people from which he had always been estranged.

A marvellous accomplishment, both by John Nash, his family, his ardent supporters in the mathematical community, and Sylvia Nasar. (show less)

 

 

by Facebook-användare

No, it's a flop!

Okay, so I'm actually listening to this on CD, rather than reading it and I'm about 1/3 of the way through. I gotta say, if I'd been reading it, I... (show more)

Okay, so I'm actually listening to this on CD, rather than reading it and I'm about 1/3 of the way through. I gotta say, if I'd been reading it, I'd have tossed it aside 10 chapters ago. It is a challenging story to absorb. So far there's been more about math, logarithms, theorems, game theory, etc. and Nash's homosexual tendencies than there's been about his schizophrenia. The "story" is very ho-hum...it drags on and on and on and on, and many of the stories that are told about Nash are so similar, that you feel like you're hearing the same thing over and over. It also does not have a linear timeline....it jumps back and forth so much that your head spins just trying to keep up. It's dry & boring. Okay, well about 3/4 of the way through, it finally starts talking about Nash's schizophrenia & it's actually pretty interesting. Very sad, too. But how does it end?!?!?!? 2 chapters left & the CD started skipping. I checked it out from the library, so now I'm going to have to check out the book just to get the ending. Sigh. This book was way more trouble than it was worth!!! (show less)

 

 

by Facebook-användare

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  economics, zero sum games, romance, madness, mathematics, physics, non-fictional accounts of scientists who changed our world--some ego-maniacs and others fascinating lovely clowns, family strife, creations of monsters, complete lack of empathy and understanding, relativity of "crazy", isolation rivaling any horror story, much to be read between the lines, information highway origins, single-ness of purpose, familial control and mis-judgment, Nobel Prize long after the fact, confli... (show more)

  economics, zero sum games, romance, madness, mathematics, physics, non-fictional accounts of scientists who changed our world--some ego-maniacs and others fascinating lovely clowns, family strife, creations of monsters, complete lack of empathy and understanding, relativity of "crazy", isolation rivaling any horror story, much to be read between the lines, information highway origins, single-ness of purpose, familial control and mis-judgment, Nobel Prize long after the fact, conflicted "normal " people taking charge, discussions of theories, universities, psychology, psychiatry...cannot walk away from this biography...defy one to read ahead without backing up to review and clarify and inform fully...a textbook for living one's life in this technologically obsessed and sadly tragically disconnected world...a BEAUTIFUL book, the best! the film did not even come close...crowe did though! fantastic! (show less)

   

  by Facebook-användare on Jul 25, 2009 at 05:00AM

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  An unauthorized biography of John Forbes Nash. Nash was a genius mathematician who was also schizophrenic and had a remission late in life...oh yeah and he won a Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (Nobel Prize). This book is as much a history of mathematics in the last century as it is a description of the troubles and manor of the disease schizophrenia as it is an account of the real life of a mathematical genius and those people who surrounded him. It's long... (show more)

  An unauthorized biography of John Forbes Nash. Nash was a genius mathematician who was also schizophrenic and had a remission late in life...oh yeah and he won a Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (Nobel Prize). This book is as much a history of mathematics in the last century as it is a description of the troubles and manor of the disease schizophrenia as it is an account of the real life of a mathematical genius and those people who surrounded him. It's long, and you've got to be interested in learning about things to enjoy it, but I liked it and I think it's worth a read. Caution: After reading this book you might feel like you yourself are a bit schizophrenic. (show less)

   

   

  by Vaughn Micciche on Sep 30, 2009 at 02:58PM

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