There's a picture of Russell Crowe on the cover of A BEAUTIFUL MIND, something that may have been rather off-putting to some. I know I wouldn't have read it if I hadn't received it for Christmas. Sylvia Nasar also spends an inordinate amount of time telling the reader how movie-star handsome and how powerfully built John Nash was. ... There are lots of pictures; let the reader decide.
As I was reading this book, I kept thinking of Richard Wagner. Wagner was certainly a musical genius, but supposedly left a lot to be desired as a human being. Most people would excuse Wagner, though, because he was an undeniable genius. John Nash was supposedly a mathematical genius. He won the Nobel prize in economics for something called game theory. He was not a very nice man. He seduces a young woman, has a child with her, then refuses to marry her or support their son. He's conceited, a lackluster teacher, and a closet homosexual. But then just as he approaches thirty, he contracts schizophrenia. He's sent to sanitariums, undergoes insulin shock therapy, has a short remission and then a relapse that lasts something like thirty years. The suspense lies in the fact that Nash was somehow able to cure himself and the reader wants to know how he went about doing that. Paranoid schizophrenia is supposed to be an incurable disease, after all. Nasar does a credible job disputing that. She cites studies that peg the number at something like eight percent who were eventually cured.
Nasar is a former economics correspondent for The New York Times, but she's no Carl Sagen or Machio Kaku or even Stephen Hawking. They manage to make their arcane topics palatable to laymen. A BEAUTIFUL MIND, on the other hand, is littered with algebraic formulae that make about as much sense as Egyptian hieroglyphics. The reader also has no idea how game theory applies to economics until Nasar finally gets around to it in Chapter 49: "...in the world of megamergers, big government, massive foreign direct investment, and wholesale privatization, where the game is played by a handful of players, each taking into account the others' actions, each pursuing his own best strategies, game theory has come to the fore." She then goes on to illustrate how this works, as Al Gore auctions off airwaves for new wireless gadgets. Supposedly, without Nash's theory, the auction would have resulted in utter chaos.
We also get an intriguing look inside the selection process for the Nobel prize, not at all as civilized as one might expect.

Dave Schwinghammer's novel, SOLDIER'S GAP, a Fargo-esque murder mystery with a literary underpinning, is available on authorsden.com and at Amazon.com, new and used. Please check the reviews. Thank you.