John von Neumann was one of the greatest prodigies of the last century. His right-wing politics and the fact that he made seminal contributions to many fields of science account for his not having won a Nobel prize. Nevertheless many Nobel laureates considered his intellect far superior to theirs.
v.N's many talents account for nobody having yet written a biography that does him justice, as it's very unlikely that anyone with the mind to understand his seminal contributions to many branches of science would have the spare time to write such a book.
Aspray has done an superb job of describing von Neumann's contributions to computer science. By referencing many details in the exhaustive references he enables his readers to quickly find von Neumann's original work if they want to get to the nitty gritty of his contributions and spares the average reader details that would have made the book tedious and unreadable.
I strongly suspect that this will remain the reference book on J. v. N's contributions to computer science; his daughter was quite pleased with it.
