A commendable effort, but this book certainly lost me. I didn't enjoy the author constantly jumping from topic to topic. I know it was to show correlation between one subject effort/scientist to another, but at times it was just name after name, and it was a bit exhausting to keep up.

I also felt that for every scientist, he was providing background and information on them and then eventually their slow "descent into madness". That was about it for me - I presumed that he would have provided more insight into WHY these people progressively drew away from people, etc. etc. It just seemed that for every scientist he just dumped all that background information, and then moved on to the next. It almost felt like one of those trivia books that provide surface-level knowledge on random subjects. I longed so much for more input, more of the author's own narrative to how this relates to the current world we live in right now. I am by no means trying to discredit the author, but I feel like I could have just researched some of this information myself. 

Perhaps I had an unrealistic expectation going into this book because of the rave reviews, so that's definitely on me.