
The Maniac
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wish list failed.
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Buy Now for $26.22
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
Gergo Danka
-
Eva Magyar
-
Written by:
-
Benjamin Labatut
About this listen
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
Benjamín 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.
©2023 Benjamin Labatut (P)2023 Penguin AudioYou may also enjoy...
-
Time of the Magicians
- Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade that Reinvented Philosophy
- Written by: Wolfram Eilenberger, Shaun Whiteside
- Narrated by: Rhett Samuel Price
- Length: 13 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The year is 1919. The horror of the First World War is fresh for the protagonists of Time of the Magicians, each of whom finds himself at a crucial juncture. Benjamin is trying to flee his overbearing father and floundering in his academic career, living hand to mouth as a critic. Wittgenstein, by contrast, has dramatically decided to divest himself of the monumental fortune he stands to inherit, in search of spiritual clarity.
Written by: Wolfram Eilenberger, and others
-
I Am Dynamite!
- A Life of Nietzsche
- Written by: Sue Prideaux
- Narrated by: Nicholas Guy Smith
- Length: 17 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Nietzsche wrote that all philosophy is autobiographical, and in this vividly compelling, myth-shattering biography, Sue Prideaux brings listeners into the world of this brilliant, eccentric, and deeply troubled man, illuminating the events and people that shaped his life and work. I Am Dynamite! is the essential biography for anyone seeking to understand history's most misunderstood philosopher.
-
-
Bringing Nietzsche Back to Life
- By Joseph A Gollner on 2021-07-01
Written by: Sue Prideaux
-
Journey of the Mind
- How Thinking Emerged from Chaos
- Written by: Ogi Ogas, Sai Gaddam
- Narrated by: Cary Hite
- Length: 10 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Why do minds exist? How did mud and stone develop into beings that can experience longing, regret, love, and compassion - beings that are aware of their own experience? Until recently, science offered few answers to these existential questions. Journey of the Mind is the first book to offer a unified account of the mind that explains how consciousness, language, the Self, and civilization emerged incrementally out of chaos.
Written by: Ogi Ogas, and others
-
The Man from the Future
- The Visionary Life of John von Neumann
- Written by: Ananyo Bhattacharya
- Narrated by: Nicholas Camm
- Length: 11 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The smartphones in our pockets and computers like brains. The vagaries of game theory and evolutionary biology. Nuclear weapons and self-replicating spacecrafts. All bear the fingerprints of one remarkable, yet largely overlooked, man: John von Neumann.
Written by: Ananyo Bhattacharya
-
Hiroshima
- Written by: John Hersey
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 5 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
On August 6, 1945, Hiroshima was destroyed by the first atom bomb ever dropped on a city. This book, John Hersey's journalistic masterpiece, tells what happened on that day. Told through the memories of survivors, this timeless, powerful and compassionate document has become a classic "that stirs the conscience of humanity" (The New York Times).
Written by: John Hersey
-
Nausea (New Directions Paperbook)
- Written by: Jean-Paul Sartre
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 8 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Sartre's greatest novel and existentialism's key text, now introduced by James Wood, and read by the inimitable Edoardo Ballerini. Nausea is the story of Antoine Roquentin, a French writer who is horrified at his own existence. In impressionistic, diary form, he ruthlessly catalogs his every feeling and sensation.
Written by: Jean-Paul Sartre
-
Time of the Magicians
- Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade that Reinvented Philosophy
- Written by: Wolfram Eilenberger, Shaun Whiteside
- Narrated by: Rhett Samuel Price
- Length: 13 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The year is 1919. The horror of the First World War is fresh for the protagonists of Time of the Magicians, each of whom finds himself at a crucial juncture. Benjamin is trying to flee his overbearing father and floundering in his academic career, living hand to mouth as a critic. Wittgenstein, by contrast, has dramatically decided to divest himself of the monumental fortune he stands to inherit, in search of spiritual clarity.
Written by: Wolfram Eilenberger, and others
-
I Am Dynamite!
- A Life of Nietzsche
- Written by: Sue Prideaux
- Narrated by: Nicholas Guy Smith
- Length: 17 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Nietzsche wrote that all philosophy is autobiographical, and in this vividly compelling, myth-shattering biography, Sue Prideaux brings listeners into the world of this brilliant, eccentric, and deeply troubled man, illuminating the events and people that shaped his life and work. I Am Dynamite! is the essential biography for anyone seeking to understand history's most misunderstood philosopher.
-
-
Bringing Nietzsche Back to Life
- By Joseph A Gollner on 2021-07-01
Written by: Sue Prideaux
-
Journey of the Mind
- How Thinking Emerged from Chaos
- Written by: Ogi Ogas, Sai Gaddam
- Narrated by: Cary Hite
- Length: 10 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Why do minds exist? How did mud and stone develop into beings that can experience longing, regret, love, and compassion - beings that are aware of their own experience? Until recently, science offered few answers to these existential questions. Journey of the Mind is the first book to offer a unified account of the mind that explains how consciousness, language, the Self, and civilization emerged incrementally out of chaos.
Written by: Ogi Ogas, and others
-
The Man from the Future
- The Visionary Life of John von Neumann
- Written by: Ananyo Bhattacharya
- Narrated by: Nicholas Camm
- Length: 11 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The smartphones in our pockets and computers like brains. The vagaries of game theory and evolutionary biology. Nuclear weapons and self-replicating spacecrafts. All bear the fingerprints of one remarkable, yet largely overlooked, man: John von Neumann.
Written by: Ananyo Bhattacharya
-
Hiroshima
- Written by: John Hersey
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 5 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
On August 6, 1945, Hiroshima was destroyed by the first atom bomb ever dropped on a city. This book, John Hersey's journalistic masterpiece, tells what happened on that day. Told through the memories of survivors, this timeless, powerful and compassionate document has become a classic "that stirs the conscience of humanity" (The New York Times).
Written by: John Hersey
-
Nausea (New Directions Paperbook)
- Written by: Jean-Paul Sartre
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 8 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Sartre's greatest novel and existentialism's key text, now introduced by James Wood, and read by the inimitable Edoardo Ballerini. Nausea is the story of Antoine Roquentin, a French writer who is horrified at his own existence. In impressionistic, diary form, he ruthlessly catalogs his every feeling and sensation.
Written by: Jean-Paul Sartre
-
Life's Edge
- The Search for What It Means to Be Alive
- Written by: Carl Zimmer
- Narrated by: Joe Ochman
- Length: 9 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Carl Zimmer investigates one of the biggest questions of all: What is life? The answer seems obvious until you try to seriously answer it. Is the apple sitting on your kitchen counter alive, or is only the apple tree it came from deserving of the word? If we can’t answer that question here on Earth, how will we know when and if we discover alien life on other worlds? The question hangs over some of society’s most charged conflicts - whether a fertilized egg is a living person, for example, and when we ought to declare a person legally dead.
Written by: Carl Zimmer
-
Wanderers
- A Novel
- Written by: Chuck Wendig
- Narrated by: Dominic Hoffman, Xe Sands
- Length: 32 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Shana wakes up one morning to discover her little sister in the grip of a strange malady. She appears to be sleepwalking. She cannot talk and cannot be woken up. And she is heading with inexorable determination to a destination that only she knows. But Shana and her sister are not alone. Soon, they are joined by a flock of sleepwalkers from across America, on the same mysterious journey. And like Shana, there are other "shepherds" who follow the flock to protect their friends and family on the long dark road ahead.
-
-
Excellent Read .. Listen.
- By Eric on 2019-07-23
Written by: Chuck Wendig
-
The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man
- A Memoir
- Written by: Paul Newman, David Rosenthal - editor, Melissa Newman - foreword, and others
- Narrated by: Jeff Daniels, Melissa Newman, Clea Newman Soderlund, and others
- Length: 8 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1986, Paul Newman and his closest friend, screenwriter Stewart Stern, began an extraordinary project. Stuart was to compile an oral history, to have Newman’s family and friends and those who worked closely with him, talk about the actor’s life. And then Newman would work with Stewart and give his side of the story. The only stipulation was that anyone who spoke on the record had to be completely honest. The result is The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man—revelatory and introspective, personal and analytical, loving and tender in places, always complex and profound.
-
-
disappointing
- By WEC on 2022-10-19
Written by: Paul Newman, and others
-
The Case Against Reality
- Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes
- Written by: Donald Hoffman
- Narrated by: Timothy Andrés Pabon
- Length: 8 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Challenging leading scientific theories that claim that our senses report back objective reality, cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman argues that while we should take our perceptions seriously, we should not take them literally. How can it be possible that the world we see is not objective reality? And how can our senses be useful if they are not communicating the truth? Hoffman grapples with these questions and more over the course of this eye-opening work.
-
-
Accompanying PDF?
- By Amazon Customer on 2019-12-27
Written by: Donald Hoffman
-
The Deep History of Ourselves
- The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains
- Written by: Joseph LeDoux
- Narrated by: Fred Sanders
- Length: 11 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Renowned neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux digs into the natural history of life on earth to provide a new perspective on the similarities between us and our ancestors in deep time. This pause-resisting survey of the whole of terrestrial evolution sheds new light on how nervous systems evolved in animals, how the brain developed, and what it means to be human. In The Deep History of Ourselves, LeDoux argues that the key to understanding human behavior lies in viewing evolution through the prism of the first living organisms.
Written by: Joseph LeDoux
-
Some Assembly Required
- Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA
- Written by: Neil Shubin
- Narrated by: Marc Cashman
- Length: 7 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Over billions of years, ancient fish evolved to walk on land, reptiles transformed into birds that fly, and apelike primates evolved into humans that walk on two legs, talk, and write. For more than a century, paleontologists have traveled the globe to find fossils that show how such changes have happened.
-
-
One of the best books in understanding molecular biology of evolution
- By Syamkumar M Divakaramenon on 2021-06-23
Written by: Neil Shubin
What the critics say
“Labatut’s latest virtuosic effort, at once a historical novel and a philosophical foray, is a thematic sequel, an exploration of what results when we take reason to even further extremes . . . A contemporary writer of thrilling originality . . . The MANIAC is a work of dark, eerie and singular beauty.”—Becca Rothfeld, The Washington Post
“What [Labatut] brings to the page is something almost indescribably layered and complex that feels like a genre unto itself . . . Labatut has an uncanny ability to inhabit the psyche of these subjects—even though he’s conjuring up their recollections, they still come across as wholly reliable narrators. There is so much depth and profundity within their reminiscing, so much foreshadowing of the present moment when it seems AI is all we’re hearing about.”—Allison Arieff, San Francisco Chronicle
“The novel’s final section, a thrilling human-versus-machine matchup, points to what von Neumann had wrought—and reflects the warnings of Labatut’s Wigner. Although its science never strays from what’s been reported in the real world and although Labatut honors the discipline of historical fiction, The MANIAC qualifies as science fiction, at least as practiced by Mary Shelley and her adaptors. Neither Shelley nor Labatut includes in their work a scene of a scientist shouting, ‘It’s alive!’ as some cursed creation lumbers to life. But the warning of that moment powers The MANIAC as surely as electricity enlivened Frankenstein’s monster, a breakthrough who, in every telling, boasts the capacity to break us.”—Alan Scherstuhl, Scientific American
What listeners say about The Maniac
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Amazon Customer
- 2023-11-29
Engaging, disturbing, philosophical
Love the narrative style -monologue storytelling of a group of personalities that were arguably the most impactful of the 20th century. Ending with a most unexpected but insightful look at the game of go, and the advent of computer supremacy when applied to this most simple yet complex of humanity’s games
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- GBeltgens
- 2024-08-06
Fascinating story
Very engaging, informative and well read. I look forward to the author's next book.i hope it comes soon.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!