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A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar
A Beautiful Mind
3/5. A substantial biography of an interesting asshole. Though for all its length, it doesn't manage to go deep on his mathematics (fair enough, you clearly need many years of training to even play ball), his queerness, his schizophrenia, or his eventual sort of remission of symptoms. This book was a little hard for me to read, as I have a close relative with severe paranoid schizophrenia, and the scars that has left on the family are, um, a lot. And speaking for myself, I spent a bit of time in my twenties looking over my shoulder, as it were, waiting to see if it was coming for me.
A good book, if frustrating where you can see how she could really have benefited from more information from the horse's mouth, but what can you do. Specifically, what was his internal experience of his kind of recovery like? He said it was like dieting – the symptoms and delusions were still there, but he had a kind of discipline over them. How? Was it the slow work of a methodical thinker over thirty years? Luck? Not like he knew either, but.
And yes, he was a truly enormous asshole before becoming ill, and then a different kind of asshole because he was ill, and then, later, something much quieter, more contained. This book almost violated my no-bios-of-assholes rule, but I stuck with it and I'm glad I did.
3/5. A substantial biography of an interesting asshole. Though for all its length, it doesn't manage to go deep on his mathematics (fair enough, you clearly need many years of training to even play ball), his queerness, his schizophrenia, or his eventual sort of remission of symptoms. This book was a little hard for me to read, as I have a close relative with severe paranoid schizophrenia, and the scars that has left on the family are, um, a lot. And speaking for myself, I spent a bit of time in my twenties looking over my shoulder, as it were, waiting to see if it was coming for me.
A good book, if frustrating where you can see how she could really have benefited from more information from the horse's mouth, but what can you do. Specifically, what was his internal experience of his kind of recovery like? He said it was like dieting – the symptoms and delusions were still there, but he had a kind of discipline over them. How? Was it the slow work of a methodical thinker over thirty years? Luck? Not like he knew either, but.
And yes, he was a truly enormous asshole before becoming ill, and then a different kind of asshole because he was ill, and then, later, something much quieter, more contained. This book almost violated my no-bios-of-assholes rule, but I stuck with it and I'm glad I did.