Why it's essential
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography and the inspiration for an Academy Award-winning movie, is a true story of genius and madness, recovery and redemption, determination and love.
What is A Beautiful Mind about?
Written by accomplished journalist , A Beautiful Mind is a biography of John Forbes Nash Jr., the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician who laid the foundations of game theory at age 21 and battled paranoid schizophrenia for 30 years.
Editor's review
Mysia is a book person who loves escaping into twisty mysteries and contemporary fiction driven by complicated characters.
I saw the movie A Beautiful Mind several years before I read the book that inspired it—Sylvia Nasar’s meticulously researched and unflinchingly honest biography of mathematical genius John Forbes Nash Jr.—largely because part of it was filmed in my neighborhood. During the early scenes featuring a mysterious Department of Defense agent who seeks out Nash (played by Russell Crowe) for a classified assignment to thwart a Soviet plot, you can catch a glimpse of the imposing brick building I see every time I look out my second-floor home office window. (That same building, a former isolation hospital, was recently transformed into the fictional Arkham State Hospital for Joker 2.) The movie works (especially for first-time viewers) because we believe Agent William Parcher is real and so is the danger to Nash. Later in the film, we learn the truth—Parcher is not real, and neither are Nash's best friend, Charles Herman, and his young niece, Marcee. They are all hallucinations, existing only in Nash’s mind.
A Beautiful Mind is an uplifting movie. Yet as I learned from A Beautiful Mind, the book—which is brilliantly written by Nasar, an accomplished journalist with a background in economics, and brilliantly narrated by Anna Fields—Parcher, Charles, and Marcee are figments of the screenwriter’s imagination. In real life, Nash, typical of individuals with schizophrenia, never saw his hallucinations as fleshed-and-blood people. That’s not to say, however, that his thinking wasn’t delusional. For decades, starting in 1959 at age 30, Nash saw and believed in extraterrestrials—the same way he saw and believed in his solutions to mathematical problems that defied conventional logic and flew in the face of prevailing opinions. The aliens that sent him messages about his mission to save the world—messages that drove him to resign his MIT professorship, seek to renounce his American citizenship, and get himself expelled from both France and Switzerland—were the product of the same mental process he used for his revolutionary breakthroughs, including game theory.
