ariadiamond 's review for:

The MANIAC by Benjamín Labatut

2.25

---

Every man is a (self-proclaimed) genius, but every man drives himself mad when he finds the limits of his genius. The women are just wives (also genius, but not relevant), driven mad by their genius husbands. As they lay dying, the men finally start to question whether their genius creations (nuclear weapons) maybe were a bad idea that made the world a worse place.

The last third feels like an out of place discussion about the game of Go and how AI now is better than humans (but technically is related to John von Neumann’s work with self-replicating and advancing automata and computers). This book being a triptych of various geniuses/madmen felt imbalanced and more a story of von Neumann with an appendix that didn’t tie in.