The Genius in my Basement
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The Genius in my Basement
Buy Now for £12.99
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Narrated by:
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Jot Davies
About this listen
An intimate portrait of an everyday genius.
Alexander Master’s landlord, Simon, lives in the basement of their Cambridge house. Between teetering towers of outdated maps and slagheaps of plastic bags, Simon eats endless meals of tinned kippers and plans trips on the Cambridge public transport system.
But Simon was one of the greatest mathematical prodigies of the twentieth century. He spends his time between train journeys working on a theoretical puzzle so complex and critical to our understanding of the universe that it is known as the Monster.
Poignant and comical, ‘Simon: The Genius in my Basement’ is about the frailty of brilliance and how genius matters very little in the search for happiness.
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Critic reviews
From the reviews of ‘Stuart: A Life Backwards’:
‘Unique and wonderful’ Daily Mail
‘This is a very rare and haunting book … A great first book’ Andrew O'Hagan
'Good books like this appear about once every five years. It's been years since I've been so delighted by a book and so surprised by it … When I'd finished I felt bereft, as if I'd lost an old friend' Zadie Smith
'I feel so strongly about this strange, funny, sad book that I hardly know where to begin … My enthusiasm feels almost limitless. A page-turner' Observer
'Funny and original, a startling book … By the end I was doubled up in tears, but throughout I was often doubled up with laughter. It is dazzling' Vogue
'A remarkable biography. Unforgettably moving. A gripping read' Tim Lott, Sunday Times
'With his first book, Alexander Masters … has achieved something remarkable. He has, without patronising, given a voice to the "underclass"; at the same time, without preaching, he shows us the value of even the most damaged of human lives … a powerful book, humane, instructive and entirely original' Sunday Telegraph
This book was uplifted further by fantastic narration. You get a strong feeling for what Simon is like ( and Alexander a bit also) and had me laughing out loud in parts.
Interesting story, great narration
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This review is based on just the first quarter of the book. If asked to sum up my thoughts, I would say that the book is irritating and pretentious. And the author is an unprincipled, possibly jealous, wannabee celebrity. The subject of the book is a socially inept mathematics genius called Simon Norton. In fact, it seems that he is virtually a social outcast, who lives in a squalid basement flat and communicates verbally using a variety of tonal grunts. So, what happens when a biographer discovers he is living above a genius? Answer, he enters his subjects life and writes a biography. So far, so good. This could have led to a really interesting insight into Norton’s academic achievements and the areas where he has pushed back the boundaries of mathematical knowledge. Along the way, his foibles would have emerged and the reader could have been suitable impressed that a person, so incapable of negotiating life’s normal social environment, could be a mathematical genius. The biography of Nobel prize winner John Nash falls into this category and it spawned the well-received film, A beautiful Mind. What we get from Masters is a painfully detailed description of the cluttered and dilapidated nature of Norton’s living area, his eating habits, and his petty obsessions. Having looked up Masters other works, it appears that he is taking the genre of predatory biographer to a new low and my main gripe is about how badly the author seems to have bullied his subject. Finally, I want to say that I was underwhelmed by the prose, which seemed like an amalgam of styles, sometimes bordering on pastiche. My views are clearly not typical and I should also point out that I hated the last year’s best seller called The Hare with Amber Eyes.
Marmite
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