A Beautiful Mind by Slyvia Naser chronicles the life of John Nash. John was a brilliant mathematician who helped found game theory, he was a Cold War strategist and a Nobel Prize winner for economics. This biography thoroughly details his life starting with his college year, following him through his schizophrenic break and ending after his miraculous recovery and Nobel Prize win. The story is very detailed in all aspects of his life. We get to have an inside look on his school friendships, his relationships both secret and public as well has his fall into paranoid delusions.
I listened to this book on audio. The narrator had an a tone to her voice that came off as academic in nature. I think this fits the book very well. Nash himself was a genius and he rubs shoulders with folks at MIT and Harvard, meets Einstein and just has a very academic forward life. So, the professor-like quality to the narrator just added to the feel of the book. I also attribute being about to complete the book to the fact that I chose the audiobook version. There were a lot of clinical terms and large words that may have been a turn off for me in print.
I picked this book up because I had seen the movie adaptation many years ago. The book was much harder to get into. The beginning of the book was so detailed and almost clinical that I found myself zoning out several times. It was not until his schizophrenia kicked in that the book picked up and got interesting. Contrary to the movie, his actual delusions were auditory instead of hallucinations. The book spanned almost 50 years and a lot of time was spent on his personal relationships. Nash had a hard time feeling love and described his relationships as meaningful encounters. These were with both women and men but like many men of his time, his class and social standing kept him from marrying anyone that would “look bad.” I think it was interesting that this meant so much to him and seeing him trying to navigate through these relationships while dealing with his illness was insightful.
Overall, I would not say that I enjoyed the book. It is a very rare occasion that I say that the movie was better, however, the tone of the narrator, the very detailed explanations of the clinical aspects and the large span of time that was covered did make it hard for me to stay engaged. The same points, while dramatized, still came across in the movie version with much less of a time commitment. While his life is fascinating and learning about his contributions to mathematics while battling his disease is interesting, this format was not for me. I rate the book 2.5 out of 5 stars and would only recommend it to students of mathematics, economics, or psychology.
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