Reviews by Bruce Carney

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A Beautiful Mind: The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash
by Sylvia Nasar
Endnotes to Distraction (8/27/2009)
The New York Times book review says A Beautiful Mind "reads like a fine novel." Except, a fine novel doesn't have endnotes plaguing the entire text. Sylvia Nasar must be German. If not at the end of every sentence, at least at the end of every line of thought, there lies an endnote. (The Germans are famous for documenting everything to distraction; this is not a stereotype.) The book is ridiculously over-documented. (For example, Chapter 1 alone, which is only 15 pages long, has 63 endnotes!) This is terribly distracting for me as the reader, especially considering that hardly any of the notes actually elucidates anything; just documents, documents, documents, as if it were a college thesis. The book (as a "novel" -- think Dana's "Two Years Before The Mast") would be a much smoother read -- and in no way diminished -- if the endnotes were left out altogether. Publisher please consider. Perhaps there could be a version published SANS ENDNOTES for non-German readers.
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