# The MANIAC - Hardcover

by **Benjamin Labatut** (Author)

**Named One of the 10 Best Books of 2023 by _The Washington Post_ and _Publishers Weekly_ **_\-_ One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2023** \- A National Bestseller - A _New York Times_ Editor's Choice pick **\- Nominated for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction****

"Captivating and unclassifiable, at once a historical novel and a philosophical foray . . . Labatut is a writer of thrilling originality. _The MANIAC_ is a work of dark, eerie and singular beauty." --__The Washington Post__

"Darkly absorbing . . . A brooding, heady narrative that is addictively interesting." --__Wall Street Journal_  
_  
From one of contemporary literature's most exciting new voices, a haunting story centered on the Hungarian polymath John von Neumann, tracing the impact of his singular legacy on the dreams and nightmares of the twentieth century and the nascent age of AI

Benjam? Labatut's _When We Cease to Understand the World_ electrified a global readership. A Booker Prize and National Book Award finalist, and one of the _New York Times_' Ten Best Books of the Year, it explored the life and thought of a clutch of mathematicians and physicists who took science to strange and sometimes dangerous new realms. In _The MANIAC_, Labatut has created a tour de force on an even grander scale.

A prodigy whose gifts terrified the people around him, John von Neumann transformed every field he touched, inventing game theory and the first programable computer, and pioneering AI, digital life, and cellular automata. Through a chorus of family members, friends, colleagues, and rivals, Labatut shows us the evolution of a mind unmatched and of a body of work that has unmoored the world in its wake.

_The MANIAC_ places von Neumann at the center of a literary triptych that begins with Paul Ehrenfest, an Austrian physicist and friend of Einstein, who fell into despair when he saw science and technology become tyrannical forces; it ends a hundred years later, in the showdown between the South Korean Go Master Lee Sedol and the AI program AlphaGo, an encounter embodying the central question of von Neumann's most ambitious unfinished project: the creation of a self-reproducing machine, an intelligence able to evolve beyond human understanding or control.

A work of beauty and fabulous momentum, _The MANIAC_ confronts us with the deepest questions we face as a species.

### Author Biography

**Benjam? Labatut** is a Chilean author born in the Netherlands in 1980. He was raised in The Hague before settling in Chile, where he lives and works. He is the author of _Antarctica starts here_ (2009), a short story collection; _After the Light_ (2016), a series of scientific, philosophical, and historical notes on the void; _The Stone of Madness_ (2021), a diptych on madness, chaos, and modernity; and _When We Cease to Understand the World_ (2021), a book that explores the ecstasy and agony of scientific breakthroughs and has been translated into over thirty languages.

**Number of Pages:** 368

**Dimensions:** 1.2 x 9.29 x 6.31 IN

**Publication Date:** October 03, 2023

## Details

- **Price:** 28.0 USD
- **Vendor:** Books by splitShops
- **Type:** Books
- **Tags:** Books by splitShops, Shopify Collective

## Variants

| Variant | Price | Available |
|---------|-------|-----------|
| Default Title | 28.00 USD | In stock |

## Images

- The MANIAC - Hardcover

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