I read this book after having seen the movie. The intimate, personal nature of the community in which the events occurred drew me in and I appreciated the author's descriptive passages. I learned quite a bit from the author's personalization of events that had happened before my time. It made them seem more vivid and real to me.

The suspenseful nature of the plot also helped keep me interested. It's not easy for an author to balance the different perspectives of the characters in a story without portraying people as 'good guys' and 'bad guys' but the author made me feel that his characters were human, fallible, and emotionally vulnerable by revealing their inner thoughts without revealing too much about the eventual outcome.

In public school, I didn't enjoy history because I had teachers who never went beyond making us memorize names and dates. I would have enjoyed the subject much more if I had been encouraged to read books like this story of the human heart wrapped within the framework of historical events.

I was inspired to read this aptly titled biography of a brilliant mathematician after seeing Ron Howard's film. This type of subject matter is often avoided by Hollywood filmmakers, so hats off to Howard for tackling a project many filmmakers would have rejected.

This fairly big book goes far beyond the film in terms of detail. Sylvia Nasar covers the life of Nash from childhood through a devastating illness to a certain functional recovery, along with his loves, successes, failures, and imperfections. Nasar is a biographer and journalist, not a mathematician, and thus cannot be expected to delve deep into the mathematical intricacies of Nash's professional life, but she includes enough well-footnoted detail to enable the layperson or beginning mathematics student to appreciate his importance to the fields of mathematics and economics and provides insight into how Nash's wife created an environment within which Nash's talents could be nurtured rather than lost.

I enjoyed the book, as did many of my more scientifically- and technically-inclined friends.