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"The Man from the Future" tries to do two separate things and gets mixed-to-positive results: starting as a biography of a great luminary of the twentieth century, rooted in the historical moment he grew up into and fled from, it gradually transforms into a collection of essays on the main scientific and technological revolutions from WWII to our present and beyond. In all of those - the bomb, the space age, computing, artificial intelligence and more - von Neumann had a defining role and was indeed a visionary; the latter chapters dazzle at times with the thinkers and doers that get entangled in some debate or other. The life philosophy of the refugee from the lost world of Jewish Central Europe is threaded through the dilemmas discussed, but the melding together of the two 'books' within the shortish title leaves something to be desired