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Title: A Beautiful Mind: The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash by Sylvia Nasar ISBN: 0743224574 Publisher: Touchstone Books Pub. Date: 27 November, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.23
Rating: 4
Summary: An ambitious biography
Comment: Now that the Ron Howard film has been released, it is difficult to review the book on its own merits. Yet this biography is so strong, it can stand on its own. Nasar is an excellent writer who can create excellent pen pictures of life at RAND, MIT and Princeton. She shows great style in creating the environment of the late 1940s and the 1950s. Nash emerges as a complex, demanding and flawed person - an individual. Nash has since refuted the claims of anti-semitism and homosexuality in the book, but it is good to see that Nasar does not side step the issues at all. It is probably prudent to read Nash's comments on the book before making a judgement.
Where Nash is weak is in her descriptions of mathematical formulae. She does not appear to have any real understanding of the mathematics and I would have thought a plain English explanation of his work would have strengthened the biography. I got a little frustrated that she did not tackle this task. Yet it is perhaps a measure of Nash's genius that the ideas are so complex they cannot be easily reduced to a paragraph. Still she could have tried harded in this area. Nasar tends to get around this problem, by getting another expert to describe the brilliance of the idea, rather than the mathemtical idea itself.
Based on my own experiences with people with schizophrenia, Nash's recovery is remarkable and this is the section is probably the most interesting, perhaps because it is so startling. Even after reading the biogrpahy, I still find it hard to believe that someone could recover given the severity of the illness, so it gives some hope to people who suffer this disability and those close to them.
An absorbing biography and close to a great one.
Rating: 5
Summary: Its heavy going but worth it
Comment: This wonderful work plays out the tale of John Nash's life against the backdrop of the world and context from which he emerged. In the course of it we see Nash, a brilliant mathematician whose struggle for sanity should seem every bit as much a search for victory as the mathematical strivings that lead to his Nobel Prize. But we also see the state of the field in which he worked his accomplishments, and the state of the world in which he carried on his struggles to interact with humanity around him. If you are going to tackle this book you need to be ready for a dense read, an historical work, heavily referenced and with a great deal of attention to historical details that give this book the solid structure of a real biography rather than a pseudo-biographical novel. I hope that comment will invite you to roll up your sleeves and dive deeply into the history of John Nash's times and field along with his life, rather than sending you away in search of something more shallow.
Rating: 4
Summary: Recomended to those who wish a deeper insight on John Nash
Comment: A marvelous biography, among the best of which I've ever read. Sylvia Nasar explores the life of John Nash in an impersonal maner. I've been impressed with how much she has explored all events concerned to his life, such as his interactin with other famous geniuses of the time, such as Robert Openheimer, Albert Einstein, among others.
While exploring his professional life, she threw in a lot of insight related to his personal life, such as his arrogance, homossexual tendency, his life with other women such as Eleanor Stier and Alicia Larde, his sons John David and John Charles (specially the amazing revelation of John Charles sickness), among many other people, as supporting or main characters in his life.
Compared to the movie, this book is a much more involving story, deeper in the sense that Sylvia Nasar explored the disease of schizophrenia, the madness within Nash's mind, his (and others') attempts to cure from it, and how succesful Nash has been throughout his trials.
Recomended to those who wish to have a deeper insight on the life of such a character, his evolution from an arrogant genius, so closed within his own mind, to the recognition of a Nobel Laureate and his continuing challenges to releave his son from the same sickness which struck and crippled him for more than a quarter century.
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Title: The Essential John Nash by John F. Nash, Sylvia Nasar, Harold Kuhn ISBN: 0691095272 Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr Pub. Date: December, 2001 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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Title: Strange Brains and Genius: The Secret Lives of Eccentric Scientists and Madmen by Clifford A. Pickover ISBN: 0688168949 Publisher: Quill Pub. Date: June, 1999 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: The Nanny Diaries: A Novel by Emma McLaughlin, Nicola Kraus ISBN: 0312278586 Publisher: St. Martin's Press Pub. Date: March, 2002 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: The Lovely Bones: A Novel by Alice Sebold ISBN: 0316666343 Publisher: Little Brown & Company Pub. Date: June, 2002 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
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Title: Atonement: A Novel by Ian McEwan ISBN: 0385503954 Publisher: Doubleday Pub. Date: 12 March, 2002 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
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