Books on the Brilliantly Disturbed

1. A Beautiful Mind

By Sylvia Nasar
Simon & Schuster, 1998

To paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald, there are no second acts in the lives of schizophrenics. Once entrenched, paranoia rarely lifts. Thus the resurrection of mathematician and economist John Nash is a tale for the ages. While Nash's conversation as a young man had "always mixed mathematics and myth," by the late 1950s the MIT professor was going far beyond eccentricity. He talked of becoming the emperor of Antarctica; he also insisted that aliens were communicating to him through the New York Times. Nash spent the next three and a half decades as a revolving-door psychiatric in-patient and aimless wanderer. But after receiving the 1994 Nobel Prize for his long-ago dissertation on game theory, the former boy wonder miraculously regained his appetite for scientific study. Sylvia Nasar's "A Beautiful Mind" is less schmaltzy and tidy than the Oscar-winning movie based on it. The Hollywood version suggests that Nash benefited from new medications, but as Nasar reports, Nash actually stopped taking antipsychotics in 1970 and relied solely on his potent mind. "Gradually," Nash recalled, "I began to reject some of the delusionally influenced lines of thinking."

2. The Man Who Loved China
By Simon Winchester
Harper, 2008

Best known for his gripping narrative about the odd couple behind the Oxford English Dictionary ("The Professor and the Madman"), Simon Winchester here portrays the hypomanic, chain-smoking Brit who produced an immense encyclopedic work all by his lonesome. In 1936, Joseph Needham, a noted biochemist and ladies man, fell in love with a young scholar from Nanjing who taught him classical Chinese. "Almost delirious with happiness" from creating his own personal English-Chinese dictionary, this "20th century Erasmus" then sought to rescue China from its lowly status as "the booby nation." Needham's magnum opus -- he produced 17 volumes before his death in 1994 -- was called "Science and Civilisation in China," and it argued that the Middle Kingdom was once way ahead of the West. Printing, for example, came six centuries before Gutenberg. Winchester spotlights Needham's perilous research trips, which brought him into contact with Chairman Mao and Zhou Enlai, as well as his colorful non-academic obsessions, including gymnosophy (i.e., nudism), Morris dancing and burnt toast.

3. Empire
By Donald Bartlett and James Steele
Norton, 1979

Nearly a full generation before Leonardo DiCaprio did his star turn in "The Aviator," Donald Bartlett and James Steele punctured the myth that once was Howard Hughes. Today it's easy to forget that Hughes's name was, for a long time, synonymous solely with gargantuan achievement. "Nobody can outdo me," the 25-year-old movie producer proclaimed shortly after taking Hollywood by storm with "Hell's Angels" (1930), an early talkie, which he also directed. Eight years later, the dashing mogul became a national hero when he shattered the record for flying around the world by a full three days. Bartlett and Steele, having sifted through 250,000 pages of documents, detail every chilling twist and turn of Hughes's descent into emotional paralysis. By the late 1960s, just about all the lonely billionaire ("Don't dare call me millionaire!") looked forward to was sitting naked in the middle of hotel rooms -- "the germ-free zone."

4. The Difference Engine
By Doron Swade
Viking, 2001

In 1822, disgusted by human error, the 30-year-old Cambridge-educated mathematician Charles Babbage dreamed up a cure: a calculating machine. After his annus horribilis of 1827, in which he lost a son as well as his wife and father, Babbage was inconsolable. To avoid a complete breakdown, he threw himself into working on a mechanical computer that he called the "difference engine." A few years later, he completed a part of Difference Engine No. 1, a 15-ton contraption that he used as a demonstration piece. Unfortunately, Babbage's obsession produced mountains of elaborate drawings for uncompleted machines but little else except bitterness. According to one of his few friends, the aging loner "spoke as if he hated mankind in general, Englishmen in particular and the English government most of all." Though as Doron Swade, a curator at the Science Museum in London, memorably shows in "The Difference Engine," this indefatigable misanthrope was the grandfather of the computer age.

5. Wizard
By Marc Seifer
Birch Lane, 1996

A century before cellphones and the Internet, another "wireless revolution" turned America upside-down. Its chief theoretician was Nikola Tesla, a Serb from Croatia, who secured the first patent for a means to produce high-frequency radio waves. Tesla was considered, along with Thomas Edison, one of the "twin wizards of electricity," Marc Seifer writes in this absorbing biography. Right after arriving in Manhattan in 1884, Tesla began working 20-hour days at Edison's lab; when his boss nixed his alternating-current induction motor, Tesla set out on his own. Seifer's meticulously researched account, some 20 years in the making, features riveting anecdotes of this man about town who hobnobbed with both Mark Twain and Stanford White. Like Howard Hughes, Tesla was a germo-phobe who called the hotel room home. But the room number had to be divisible by three, and he required assurances that no hotel employee would get within three feet of him. Sworn to celibacy, the anorexic Tesla saved up his passion for pigeons: "To care for those . . . birds . . . is the delight of my life. It is my only means of playing."

Mr. (Joshua) Kendall's biography of Peter Roget, "The Man Who Made Lists," has just been released in paperback.