I understand how some readers thought of this as a long magazine article. But, in my humble opinion, that is a neat thing. The author talks about alot of things besides a simple list of Erdos' achievements. It is a very readable book. The author talks about such as: Hungarian history, Fermat's last theorem, the history of math, etc. This is a fun read... Let me put it this way, after reading this, I am looking for other things by the same author, Paul Hoffman, and I hope he writes many other books as pleasurable to read...