The MANIAC

The MANIAC centers on John von Neumann, arguably the most brilliant and unsettling mind of the 20th century, who shaped nuclear weapons, computing, and game theory before his early death. Labatut builds the book as a chorus, narrating von Neumann's life through the recollections of his wives, colleagues, and rivals, and framing his story between two bookends: the despairing suicide of the physicist Paul Ehrenfest at the dawn of the atomic age, and the 2016 match in which the AI program AlphaGo defeated Go master Lee Sedol. The result is part biography, part philosophical inquiry into genius, technology, and the terror that comes with understanding too much. Labatut treats the history of ideas as a thriller about the limits of human reason.