Reviews

"George Johnson has nailed this biography of the brilliant and irascible Murray Gell-Mann. Strange Beauty is complex, mind-expanding, beautiful, and true." -- James Gleick
"When you have one of the world's most accomplished science writers recounting the life and times of one of the world's most accomplished scientists, readers' expectations are justifiably high. They are fully met. Johnson gives us an extraordinary view of an extraordinary man, and navigates through science that ordinarily would seem difficult, with such skill that it is not difficult at all. Strange Beauty is a masterpiece of modern biography." -- Roger Lewin
"Gell-Mann could not have written such a perceptive book about himself as Johnson has....Reads like a detective novel. Johnson does a wonderful job of describing the competition and cooperation among scientists, the egos and insecurities, the disappointments and triumphs, and the disputes, suspicions and shifting allegiances." -- "The New York Times Book Review
"Skillfully and engagingly written . . . Johnson paints a convincing portrait of Gell-Mann's personality, which is in turn charming, irritating, and generous . . . Johnson captures well his subject's inner scientific conflicts." -- "Science
"Few physicists have displayed the poetic inspiration of the Nobelist Murray Gell-Mann....In this biography he emerges as brilliant and often insufferable, relentlessly curious, hopelessly pedantic, and one of the best synthetic thinkers in the history of his field. The book [offers] a vivid sense of Gell-Mann and his contemporaries (including his collaborator and competitor Richard Feynman)...." --"The New Yorker