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In similar books, authors Sylvia Nasar and Simon Winchester relate the remarkable stories of three men who remind us that gifted persons can make valuable contributions to society and collaborate with unlikely colleagues, even while affected by deep psychoses. In A Beautiful Mind, Nasar describes the life and contributions of John Forbes Nash, Jr., a brilliant mathematician, Nobel Prize winner, and schizophrenic. In The Professor and the Madman, Winchester recounts the lives and accomplishments of James Augustus Henry Murray, professor and editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, and William Chester Minor, author, doctor, murderer, and schizophrenic.
This review is first and foremost about the stories of these three Anglo-Saxon males, two who lived in the 19th century and one in the 21st century. It is not an attempt at psycho history, but rather an account of their disordered mental functioning, setting it in the context of psychiatry and life in Great Britain and America during these periods.
In A Beautiful Mind, Nasar relates John Nash's story in five parts, chronicling his life from his 1928 birth in Bluefield, West Virginia; his formative years; college and graduate school; work at the RAND Corporation; and his teaching years at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Princeton University. He also describes Nash's unusual relationships with men and women, (including his 1957 marriage), descent into schizophrenia, reception of the Nobel Prize, and return to wellness in the 1990s.
Nash was born into a middle class family, and raised with a younger sister by his teacher mother and engineer father. He lived a solitary, introverted, indoor existence filled with incessant daydreams, questions, and commentaries about his young life. His teachers labeled him a poor student who irritated them by constantly looking for different ways to do things.
Nasar describes pivotal events in Nash's life during the years after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. John Nash, Sr. t