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This book is well crafted, to the point I had to remind myself several times that its first person accounts weren't real. Labatut turns these historical figures into believable and distinct characters with individual voices.

I learned several things about John von Neumann that I didn't know, and became interested enough to probably read more deeply in the future.

Apart from a few short quotes we don't hear from von Neumann himself in the book, and that choice really helps underscore how impossibly unique he was. Not to mention how strongly others would react to him.

Given some of the marketing around this book, I was a little disappointed to realise that (as far I know) the fiction doesn't venture far beyond historical fact. Based on how it was presented I was expecting the final act to be somehow speculative, based on more of von Neumann's ideas coming to fruition, but that's not what it actually is.

I didn't quite get the Prologue chapters about Go and AI. These are written in a more journalistic style and I couldn't connect them that strongly to the main book. A good piece on its own, but I don't quite understand why it got included here instead of becoming a longform magazine feature or something.

Still, a good read that provides much personal illumination of "the alien" while also reminding us how much of the twentieth century he contributed to.