The MANIAC review: A dark novel about the legendary John von Neumann

The MANIAC
Benjamín Labatut (Pushkin Press)

IT IS a curious and morbid indisputable fact that a number of the twentieth century’s most proficient scientists died by suicide or skilled psychological breakdowns so extreme that they needed to go away their fields altogether. One typically quoted physics textbook, States of Matter by David L. Goodstein, opens with these sentences: “Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent a lot of his life finding out statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his personal hand. Paul Ehrenfest, …