Search - A Beautiful Mind: The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash

It was a difficult read for me and I never made it through to the end. I know it was made into a movie and that might be a better choice for me.
It was too detailed in a way that was technical. I thought it would be more story-like but it was more textbook-like.

Outstanding book! A little slow starting because of the background detail Nasar includes, but worth the perseverance. An incredible story about Nobel prize-winner John Nash and his struggle and eventual victory over the incurable disease of schizophrenia.

Dense, rich biography of a fascinating person. Reveals much more than the great movie did.

I liked the movie and I like reading biographies, so this should have been a really good book for me. Unfortunately, I felt the need for a higher math education than I have to understand the first third of the book. Most of what's left is a detailed, play-by-play account of Nash's madness. The movie was very accessable, but the book is much more cerebral. The author used letters, diaries, and interviews to put together the facts, which are presented in a somewhat choppy method that does not draw one into the telling.

That said, I did read the entire book (minus the difficult parts that I skimmed) and did find his overall life interesting. I do not recommend this book to the casual reader.

I thought this was a very difficult book to read, especially in the first 100 pages or so. The parts I had the most trouble with were the passages almost all about these theorem's and describing them, and how so and so got to them, how they work, what they do, ect... I know this is a book about a mathematical genius and obviously is going to have text about math, but since I am not a genius and I like to read into every paragraph, it was difficult for me to get try to grasp what she was saying. Maybe I just read into everything too much and should focus on the bigger picture, move on and leave it as that, but I don't. After you get past these rough passages though the book really is wonderful. I would read it again. I have never seen the movie but it can't possibly beat the book. Sylvia Nasar has done a fine job of letting us glimpse into the extraordinary life of John Nash.

I wanted to see this film when it came out but I have a personal rule to read "the book" first, even if I know the movie doesn't exactly follow the story. In this case I did enjoy both, though the movie left out some very important facts about the brilliant Nash's life. Read the book, don't assume you know it all after the film. I believe these were important facts involving the realities behind his mathematical genius. He changed the way we look at fields such as sociology, international negotiations, business...A truly human story with all the beautiful blemishes.