Books like John Von Neumann

Amazon 2008-05-31. Ugh...the reviews of this one were rough, but I tried to ignore them. First off, the book has a weird appearance. Let's not count that against it, but the odd shape yielded a much longer read than the 400 pages suggest. Furthermore, I'd have liked to have seen good ol' comforting Computer Modern or CM-Super used in the typesetting of the American Mathematical Society -- the (irritatingly unlisted) typeface was rather tiring on the glazzies. But I digress.Macrae's editor noticably dropped the ball here, to a point that's distracting. An odd dozen quotes are duplicated -- sometimes several times throughout -- each time with the clear intent to unveil something new. Macrae offers the bewildering conjecture that Fermi might have "advanced an Italian bomb effort...what a change that would have been!" The Duce's industrial base in 1939 had a technological ceiling at about the marble table/epaulette level -- I'm not often moved to an audible "moron" while reading, but there you go (some ten pages later, Macrae points out that the British lacked the physical plant for isotope separation -- is the man really that blissfully unaware of relative European industrial power following the Industrial Revolution? Jesus!). On page 62, "nine-tenths" is used, which context on page 63 makes plain to have intended "one-tenth"; c'mon, this is a fucking American Mathematical publication about a mathematician written by a mathematician, get your fractions correct.There's a very uneven nature to the chapters; the first three are florid and lively, the 11th (regarding economic contributions) fairly excellent, the remainder largely staid. We learn on the final pages that these initial chapters were handed down largely unchanged from Stephen White, the project's initiator, and that Macrae's professional focus included economics. Argh! This seems clearly an example of a noble project placed in the wrong hands. Macrae's Nippophilic ejaculations become uninteresting diversion after the first few dozen instances, turning eventually bewildering and finally pathetic. Johnny was among the greatest minds of the last century, and deserved better.Macrae makes it clear in his Foreward that this is a labor of love (actually a commissioned hagiography by the Sloan Foundation, we learn later). Von Neumann's was a hard life to capture in still; Oppenheimer biographies advance unceasingly even after Kay and Bird settled that mysterious old wizard, and a stone can't be thrown at Barnes and Noble without hitting some tiring hundredth investigation of Einstein, yet this is only the third minor biography of Von Neumann. He's a difficult target for the biographer, especially the modern one. But, he's my favorite, and the few new anecdotes I could wring out of this stillborn effort spare it the Ninth Circle of single-starhood.