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Sylvia Nasar, A Beautiful Mind: A Biography of Mathematician John Nash (Simon and Schuster, 1998) Reissued in paperback in December 2001 As the front jacket puts it, this is the true story of the Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate, John Forbes Nash, Jr, a man with exceptional intelligence who won a Nobel Prize for economics in 1994. However, unlike most Nobel Prize winners, Nash suffered from paranoid schizophrenia for 30 years. Nasar, a former economics writer for The New York Times and the Knight Professor of Journalism at Columbia University Journalism School, writes in the prologue of A Beautiful Mind that the book is "a story about the mystery of the human mind, in three acts: genius, madness, reawakening." Nasar begins with the background on Nash's childhood in West Virginia through the realization of his genius in high school and college to graduate school at Princeton in the late 1940s. Nasar obviously conducted very thorough research as she details Nash from his physical appearance to the kinds of questions he asked in class. Nasar holds Nash's genius in very high regard, from his mathematical research to his famous Game Theory (for which he later won the Nobel Prize) that paved the way for a completely new way of thinking about economics. She gives the reader a detailed picture of just how brilliant but troubled Nash was as a young man. She documents his downfalls as well as his brilliance, from his affair and illegitimate child to his often "separate" lives as emotionally intimate with some people but distant with others. His courtship and marriage, while he worked at MIT, is recalled from its slow progression through his marriage and its eventual disintegration when he was sick, to its ultimately happy ending 40 years later. His progression into madness is recalled through his disappointments in not winning any mathematical prizes to his colleagues' growing fear of his behavior - starting around 1959 when he told his colleagues that abstract powers from outer space were communicating with him through The New York Times. Nasar thoroughly documents all phases of his madness, from his many delusions to his multiple stays in psychiatric institutions with vivid descriptions of the sometimes-horrifying treatments he received and the massive strain of it all on his wife, Alicia. Nasar gives details of specific delusions from which Nash suffered, from claiming different identities to paranoia about everything from genocide to the Apocalypse. She also gives the reader very useful background information about schizophrenia as a disease and how Nash fit its definitions and characteristics. The book ends emotionally with a new epilogue in the paperback edition that gives the uplifting update of John and Alicia remarrying, Nash being certain he will not relapse and making his way back to normal life. It is a very detailed portrayal of Nash's life that evokes emotion and compassion in the reader. A Beautiful Mind was a New York Times bestseller, was the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography. MORE: Richard Dooling, Salon.com on A Beautiful Mind Sylvia Nasar and Roberto Gil, Psychiatrist, discuss A Beautiful Mind and schizophrenia David Goodstein, California Institute of Technology professor, on the original 1998 hardcover edition |
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