The MANIAC

By: Benjamin Labatut

Narrated by: Gergo Danka, Eva Magyar

Named One of the 10 Best Books of 2023 by The Washington Post and Publishers Weekly • One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2023• A National Bestseller • A New York Times Editor's Choice pick • Nominated for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction

“Captivating and unclassifiable, at once a historical novel and a philosophical foray . . . Labatut is a writer of thrilling originality. The MANIAC is a work of dark, eerie and singular beauty.” —The Washington Post

“Darkly absorbing . . . A brooding, heady narrative that is addictively interesting.” —Wall Street Journal

From one of contemporary literature’s most exciting new voices, a haunting story centered on the Hungarian polymath John von Neumann, tracing the impact of his singular legacy on the dreams and nightmares of the twentieth century and the nascent age of AI

Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World electrified a global readership. A Booker Prize and National Book Award finalist, and one of the New York Times’ Ten Best Books of the Year, it explored the life and thought of a clutch of mathematicians and physicists who took science to strange and sometimes dangerous new realms. In The MANIAC, Labatut has created a tour de force on an even grander scale.

A prodigy whose gifts terrified the people around him, John von Neumann transformed every field he touched, inventing game theory and the first programable computer, and pioneering AI, digital life, and cellular automata. Through a chorus of family members, friends, colleagues, and rivals, Labatut shows us the evolution of a mind unmatched and of a body of work that has unmoored the world in its wake.

The MANIAC places von Neumann at the center of a literary triptych that begins with Paul Ehrenfest, an Austrian physicist and friend of Einstein, who fell into despair when he saw science and technology become tyrannical forces; it ends a hundred years later, in the showdown between the South Korean Go Master Lee Sedol and the AI program AlphaGo, an encounter embodying the central question of von Neumann's most ambitious unfinished project: the creation of a self-reproducing machine, an intelligence able to evolve beyond human understanding or control.

A work of beauty and fabulous momentum, The MANIAC confronts us with the deepest questions we face as a species.

Enjoyed the stylistic choices and learned a lot

I didn’t quite understand what this book was so the first quarter was trying to figure out if it was a collection of essays, who organized etc…. The stylistic choices were great in how to tell and made the historical facts be live and feel present. I really appreciated the deep dive into the mental issues of some of our greatest minds. The Go portion was good but felt like an entirely departure book. I get the connection but was a weird tack on to me.

Engaging story told w great art

This felt like I was reading biography, history and fiction created by a fine craftsman. I’ve read many biographies of the great physicists and this is standout quality. The detail revealed by von Neumann’s friends and family are engaging and reflective of the author’s understanding of scholarship. The fictional accounts of relationships seemed real. The juxtaposition of stories presented a coherent theme of the mania that can/must? accompany the highest level of technical achievement. The performances were excellent, adding a lot to the experience.

Thought provoking

Couldn’t stop listening to audio version. The Maniac brought back memories of H.A.L. from 2001. We should worry more about the irrational & rational impulses of the technocrats and scrutinize the promises & algorithms they make—and regulate AI!

Captivating

Absolutely brilliant, creating gods like a cave man. I was utterly absorbed. I even went as far as purchasing the hard copy. Enjoy!

Fascinating survey of a complicated person with ties to contemporary issues

I enjoyed the device of using different figures in von Neumann’s life to tell his story and theirs.