A Beautiful Mind: A Biography of John Forbes Nash, Jr., Winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, 1994
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List Price: $16.00
Our Price: $12.48
Your Save: $ 3.52 ( 22% )
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Manufacturer: Simon & Schuster
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 510.92
EAN: 9780684853703
ISBN: 0684853701
Label: Simon & Schuster
Manufacturer: Simon & Schuster
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 464
Publication Date: 1999-05-05
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Studio: Simon & Schuster
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Editorial Reviews:
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In this powerful and dramatic biography Sylvia Nasar vividly re-creates the life of a mathematical genius whose career was cut short by schizophrenia and who, after three decades of devastating mental illness, miraculously recovered and was honored with a Nobel Prize. A Beautiful Mind traces the meteoric rise of John Forbes Nash, Jr., a prodigy and legend by the age of thirty, who dazzled the mathematical world by solving a series of deep problems deemed "impossible" by other mathematicians. But at the height of his fame, Nash suffered a catastrophic mental breakdown and began a harrowing descent into insanity, resigning his post at MIT, slipping into a series of bizarre delusions, and eventually becoming a dreamy, ghostlike figure at Princeton, scrawling numerological messages on blackboards. He was all but forgotten by the outside world -- until, remarkably, he emerged from his madness to win world acclaim. A feat of biographical writing, A Beautiful Mind is also a fascinating look at the extraordinary and fragile nature of genius.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: the book behind the movie
Comment: A well written informatiive book. Deals with the closeness of madness and genuis, not just in John Nash. Facinatingly chronicles a period in time when all the rules were changing!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Complex Man-A Bio That Runs True
Comment: A while back I was glancing through one of my wife's magazines and found this article on John Nash. I read with interest and inexplicably began staring at one of the photos. "Oh, my God!" I recognized him. D floor. Firestone Library at Princeton University. For a while I had studied there rather steadily and spent a fair amount of time on D floor - coke machines and chatter. John Nash used to show up there fairly regularly and saw me as well. There was some gossip from the other D floor patrons about a professor in whose life something had gone wrong. Eventually Mr. Nash started to talk to me and started to show me books he was reading. I was fairly young and quite honestly became uncomfortable and uneasy for various reasons and did not promote future contacts although now I wish I had. Mr. Nash's life is fascinating to me, and I salute his achievements and recommend this book.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Mathematician-bio or creepy gay p*rn, you decide
Comment: Here are typical descriptive passages from A Beautiful Mind. My comments are in square brackets.
Description of Nash: "He had the build... of an athlete, 'a very strong, very muscular body,' one fellow graduate student recalled. He was, moreover, 'handsome as a god,' according to another student... His hair flopped over his forehead; he was constantly brushing it away. He wore his fingernails very long, which drew attention to his rather limp and beautiful hands and long, delicate fingers." [I do find very long fingernails so fetching on a man. He is the very model of a modern major general.]
There are similar descriptions of other mathematicians. For example a professor of Geometry is described as having the "body of a gymnast." [Just the indispensable thing for a professor of Geometry. One cannot help but picture him doing cartwheels in the lecture hall to illustrate a rotating pentagon.]
Another mathematician, Artin, is described as follows: "Slender, handsome, with ice-blue eyes and a spellbinding voice, Artin looked like a 1920s German matinee idol. He wore a black leather trench coat and sandals throughout the academic year, wore his hair long and smoked incessantly... He was well known for screaming and throwing chalk at students." [Sound like a matinee idol to you? ... or like Gary Numan on Benzedrine.]
The book is pathological, diagnostic of the author's (somebody named Sylvia Nasar) insanity. Also, Nasar includes lengthy technical accounts of mathematical ideas without any attempt at explication, leaving the reader to think, "Deep stuff, I guess..." She also describes in words a board game Nash allegedly invented ("Hard evidence of his genius") without any diagram of the board, the starting array of playing pieces. She seems to want the reader to get aload of this board game (modestly named "Nash") but is so incapable of straight thinking that she does not just provide a diagram, showing you how to make a board and play it. The reader is left clueless. Nasar is an example of ordinary madness of the very lowest water.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Reads like a novel
Comment: (Spoiler alert) The book wasn't anything like the movie, but an excellent and engaging read. Nasar does a thorough job of including an adequate amount of detail about the influences in Nash's life without getting too bogged down in name dropping (the list of influences is interesting). The progression of his life, as told in the book, and the events that shaped his influence in the fields of mathematics and economics, all leading to his Nobel Prize award are put together well to keep the story moving. A fast-paced, compelling read.
Two minor criticisms were the omission of occasional details about who people were or specifics of some events the reader was expected to be familiar with, and the lack of explanation about some of the theorems and proofs Nash worked with that would have provided additional insight into the level of his genius (but might also have weighed the book down).
Overall, "A Beautiful Mind" is a very worthwhile read and exciting, non-mainstream biography.
Customer Rating:
Summary: An Opinion of "A Beautiful Mind" from a fellow schizophrenic
Comment: I read this book about two weeks ago, and I couldn't put it down. Maybe my opinion is biased because I have schizophrenia myself, but I found this story to be particularly encouraging in terms of my own recovery. The genius John Nash refused the coercive treatments of psychiatry and recovered naturally as some people do. I think it's sad that John could never reach the height of his mathematical genius again, after his illness, but it's still a hopeful story because he made a complete recovery, in my opinion. This book explains the mysterious and challenging symptoms of a misunderstood illness, and it also tells a tale of a person with the classic schizophrenic personality. It seems Nash was predisposed to the illness, and his behavior leading up to his first episode is characteristic of they typical schizophrenic. The difference between Nash's story and those of so many others with this difficult illness is that John was a true genius, became mad, and then recovered through sheer willpower. I think this book challenges the prevailing biopsychiatric model of schizophrenia and demonstrates that people can indeed recover without the use of toxic psychiatric drugs. You can also learn a lot about the politics of the Nobel Prize in this book.
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