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barb4ry1 's review for:
The MANIAC
by Benjamín Labatut
4.5/5
John von Neumann changed the world. His fingerprints are everywhere - in mathematics, physics, computers, nuclear weapons, and game theory. The Maniac doesn’t tell a neat, chronological story of his life; it drags readers through a whirlwind of genius, madness, and the terrifying consequences of human intellect.
The book moves through von Neumann’s life, and shows him as the architect of modern warfare, artificial intelligence, and the logic that now governs our world. In the last part, it jumps forward, away from von Neumann, to tell the story of AlphaGo - the AI that mastered the ancient game of Go, humiliated human champions, and played moves no one had ever seen before. Von Neumann never saw this future, but in a way, he built the road to it.
Labatut’s writing is precise and elegant. It swings between history and fictionalized biography. One moment, you’re reading about the Manhattan Project; the next, you’re deep in the mind of a machine playing a perfect, almost alien game. I liked the end-result and “inhaled” the last part in one go.
If you like your history with a side of existential dread, The Maniac delivers.
Audiobook narration: good, but not inspired. With that said, I think audiobook format works very well for this kind of fictionalized biographies / non-fiction stories.
John von Neumann changed the world. His fingerprints are everywhere - in mathematics, physics, computers, nuclear weapons, and game theory. The Maniac doesn’t tell a neat, chronological story of his life; it drags readers through a whirlwind of genius, madness, and the terrifying consequences of human intellect.
The book moves through von Neumann’s life, and shows him as the architect of modern warfare, artificial intelligence, and the logic that now governs our world. In the last part, it jumps forward, away from von Neumann, to tell the story of AlphaGo - the AI that mastered the ancient game of Go, humiliated human champions, and played moves no one had ever seen before. Von Neumann never saw this future, but in a way, he built the road to it.
Labatut’s writing is precise and elegant. It swings between history and fictionalized biography. One moment, you’re reading about the Manhattan Project; the next, you’re deep in the mind of a machine playing a perfect, almost alien game. I liked the end-result and “inhaled” the last part in one go.
If you like your history with a side of existential dread, The Maniac delivers.
Audiobook narration: good, but not inspired. With that said, I think audiobook format works very well for this kind of fictionalized biographies / non-fiction stories.