Books like A Beautiful Mind

01

American Prometheus

Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin · Biography

Kai Bird and Martin J.

A kindred biography read.

02

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

Siddhartha Mukherjee · Science

The Emperor of All Maladies is Siddhartha Mukherjee's account of cancer from antiquity to the present — its biology, its treatments, its false dawns, and the scientists and patients caught in the middle of each.

A kindred biography read.

03

A Mind for Numbers

Barbara Oakley · Self-help

A Mind for Numbers is Barbara Oakley's guide to learning hard subjects effectively, written primarily for students struggling with mathematics and science but drawing on cognitive science principles that apply to any demanding field.

Both dig into mathematics.

04

The Man Who Knew Infinity

Robert Kanigel · Biography

Srinivasa Ramanujan was born in 1887 in the South Indian town of Erode into a Brahmin family of modest means, received almost no formal mathematical training, and by his mid-twenties had filled notebooks with thousands of mathematical formulas, many of them original results that professional mathematicians would spend decades verifying.

Shares genius and mathematics with A Beautiful Mind.

05

Adult Children of Alcoholics

Janet G. Woititz · Psychology

Adult Children of Alcoholics is Janet Woititz's clinical guide to the lasting psychological patterns that develop in children raised in alcoholic families.

Both dig into recovery.

06

Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk

Peter L. Bernstein · History

Against the Gods is Peter Bernstein's intellectual history of how humanity learned to measure, quantify, and manage risk — a story he traces from ancient gambling in the Mediterranean through the development of modern probability theory, statistics, and financial derivatives.

Both dig into mathematics.

07

Anatomy of an Epidemic

Robert Whitaker · Health

Anatomy of an Epidemic is Robert Whitaker's investigation into a paradox: as the use of psychiatric medication in the United States has increased dramatically over the past half-century, the number of people on disability due to mental illness has risen in parallel.

Both dig into mental illness.

08

Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

David Sheff · Memoir

Beautiful Boy is David Sheff's account of watching his son Nic become addicted to methamphetamine through his late teens and early twenties, and of the years Sheff spent trying to understand it, respond to it, and survive it as a parent.

Both dig into recovery.

09

Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

Suleika Jaouad · Memoir

Suleika Jaouad was twenty-two and newly graduated, living in Paris with her first real job and a boyfriend, when she was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia.

Both dig into recovery.

10

Brain Energy

Christopher M. Palmer · Health

Brain Energy is Christopher Palmer's argument that mental illness is fundamentally a metabolic disorder — specifically, a disorder of mitochondrial function and brain energy regulation.

Both dig into mental illness.

11

Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness

Susannah Cahalan · Memoir

Brain on Fire is Susannah Cahalan's account of the month she spent in a New York hospital in 2009, during which she experienced psychosis, paranoia, violent behavior, catatonia, and seizures — and was nearly committed to a psychiatric facility before a doctor correctly diagnosed her with anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis, a newly described autoimmune disease in which the body attacks the brain.

Both dig into recovery.

12

Chaos: Making a New Science

James Gleick · Science

Chaos: Making a New Science, published in 1987, tells the story of how a loose network of scientists working across meteorology, mathematics, biology, and physics in the 1960s and 1970s developed chaos theory — the study of systems that are deterministic but unpredictable because tiny differences in initial conditions produce wildly different outcomes.

Both dig into mathematics.