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A review by coronaurora
A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar
4.0
After the abominable feature film on his life that misrepresents and sanitises to the point of defamation, I had been yearning to read this biography of this living genius for years. Much to my relief, there is much I found to applaud in Nasar's granular recounting of John Nash's life and times.
Not least of its victories is that it does not shy away from exposing the unpleasant edifices of his personality: abandoned children, arrogance, entitlement, elitism, sexism: it's all here. Then there is his own hypocritical acting out of his sexuality: inwardly bisexual, outwardly heterosexual which Nasar perceptibly enough manages to mesh within a historical and cultural context. In fifty bite-sized chapters, she summarises countless testimonies, speeches and interviews of all those who have lived, tolerated, hated, or as much as brushed or heard of Nash. While some of her academic summation veers into dangerous territory of personality speculation and convenient joining-the-dots, there is an understatement in writing that grounds the often hialrious certainty. While very diffuse, Nasar is just-about able to give us a rare peek into a particular kind of focussed derangement of idea-infested individuals like Nash and how valued his "original" thinking and problem solving was, both for critics and collaborators. She evokes the sequence of institutional and city scapes over the years with the flourish of a seasoned novelist, although her similar attempts at sketching the multitude of humanity (and literally, their grandmother!) who as-much-as brushed Nash is often baffling and sag the book with un-needed detours.
Another high point of the book is that it offers the reader a delicious sideways ingress into the world of academia and its mores. With research and educational institutions erected in post-war America to facilitate advancement in defence and nuclear armament, and Nash having the opportunity and talent to spearhead some of the panels feeding directly or tortuously into these initiatives, the politics and atmosphere amongst the intelligentsia is revealing. Equally instructive is the bookmarking of various intellectual fences being scaled to newer pastures of no-return: the instatement of rigour and mathematics into the discipline of economics, the repercussions of which we are all privy to in this information age; the newer layers of axioms in disciplines of mathematics; the management of schizophrenia both pre-and post-use of anti-psychotic drugs (insulin-shock therapy!) and finally, the workings of the clandestine Nobel Prize committee. It's testament to Nasar's research that the book manages to inform on all these milieus are as alive as the chief mortal.
My one issue with the book is that while it's filled-to-gills with a reconstruction of John-Nash-the-person-perceived-by-others, his work in mathematics gets an unimpressive treatment. The embedding theorem, the Nash equilibrium, singularity theory and differential equations: they are all described in a cryptic and presumptively high-handed manner, thrown at the unsuspecting reader with no simplification. This could have better dealt with by a paragraph or two of context setting in accessible language of the parent fields to inflame some curiosity among the non-mathematically inclined readers. Nasar does attempt something to this effect half-heartedly when explaining the Game Theory but that's it. Nash's work, other than his mental illness, have been the key qualification for this biography, and watching this aspect not as carefully dealt as his other facets of life stop this from being a perfect biographical account. Still, it's a comprehensive, layered and balanced account of a living genius who continues to work and contribute to the world. Well worth a read.
Not least of its victories is that it does not shy away from exposing the unpleasant edifices of his personality: abandoned children, arrogance, entitlement, elitism, sexism: it's all here. Then there is his own hypocritical acting out of his sexuality: inwardly bisexual, outwardly heterosexual which Nasar perceptibly enough manages to mesh within a historical and cultural context. In fifty bite-sized chapters, she summarises countless testimonies, speeches and interviews of all those who have lived, tolerated, hated, or as much as brushed or heard of Nash. While some of her academic summation veers into dangerous territory of personality speculation and convenient joining-the-dots, there is an understatement in writing that grounds the often hialrious certainty. While very diffuse, Nasar is just-about able to give us a rare peek into a particular kind of focussed derangement of idea-infested individuals like Nash and how valued his "original" thinking and problem solving was, both for critics and collaborators. She evokes the sequence of institutional and city scapes over the years with the flourish of a seasoned novelist, although her similar attempts at sketching the multitude of humanity (and literally, their grandmother!) who as-much-as brushed Nash is often baffling and sag the book with un-needed detours.
Another high point of the book is that it offers the reader a delicious sideways ingress into the world of academia and its mores. With research and educational institutions erected in post-war America to facilitate advancement in defence and nuclear armament, and Nash having the opportunity and talent to spearhead some of the panels feeding directly or tortuously into these initiatives, the politics and atmosphere amongst the intelligentsia is revealing. Equally instructive is the bookmarking of various intellectual fences being scaled to newer pastures of no-return: the instatement of rigour and mathematics into the discipline of economics, the repercussions of which we are all privy to in this information age; the newer layers of axioms in disciplines of mathematics; the management of schizophrenia both pre-and post-use of anti-psychotic drugs (insulin-shock therapy!) and finally, the workings of the clandestine Nobel Prize committee. It's testament to Nasar's research that the book manages to inform on all these milieus are as alive as the chief mortal.
My one issue with the book is that while it's filled-to-gills with a reconstruction of John-Nash-the-person-perceived-by-others, his work in mathematics gets an unimpressive treatment. The embedding theorem, the Nash equilibrium, singularity theory and differential equations: they are all described in a cryptic and presumptively high-handed manner, thrown at the unsuspecting reader with no simplification. This could have better dealt with by a paragraph or two of context setting in accessible language of the parent fields to inflame some curiosity among the non-mathematically inclined readers. Nasar does attempt something to this effect half-heartedly when explaining the Game Theory but that's it. Nash's work, other than his mental illness, have been the key qualification for this biography, and watching this aspect not as carefully dealt as his other facets of life stop this from being a perfect biographical account. Still, it's a comprehensive, layered and balanced account of a living genius who continues to work and contribute to the world. Well worth a read.