The Nobel Prize: A History of Genius, Controversy and Prestige

Burton Feldman's absorbing book gives us a brief history of Alfred Nobel, the prizes his fortune funded, as well as fascinating details on those who won these cherished prizes. As the author explains, the Nobel Prize's combination of wealth, pomp and prestige lends it greater credibility than, say, The Fields medal, awarded every four years by the International Mathematical Union, which is much harder to win. Scandal has also helped. The tale of Marie Curie, a double Nobel Prize winner, whose amazing rags to riches story was taken up by the French media, helped to spread the fame of the Nobel awards during the crucial early years. Curie won her prizes while nursing her child - and simultaneously having a brief affair with a fellow French physicist. After Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Dirac, Pauling, Feynman and similar intellectual giants were also honored, the prestige of the Nobel Prize in Physics was assured forever. The same cannot be said for the other prizes. Hitler was proposed for the Nobel Peace Prize - for not invading Austria in 1934. Around the same time, Charlie Chaplin was proposed for the Literature prize. Leo Tolstoy, James Joyce, Emile Zola, Mark Twain, Heinrik Ibsen, August Strinberg, Henry Adams, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Anton Chekhov, Gertrude Stein, Eugene Ionesco and Virginia Woolf were all denied the prize. For anyone hoping to win the prize, it helps to have a good Swedish translation - better still if you are Swedish. Scandinavians have won the Literature Prize some fourteen times in all. The fact that one-seventh of all Nobel Literature prizes have gone to their compatriots is evidence, no doubt, of the comparative superiority of Nordic writing. Either that or it is a fix! Although Gandhi never won the Peace Prize, other equally eminent people have been so honored. These include Henri Dunant, who founded the International Red Cross; Fridtjof Nansen, a Norwegian Arctic explorer, oceanographer and tireless peace activist; and Carl von Ossietzky, who got the prize in 1935 - he was incarcerated a Nazi concentration camp at the time. Although the history of the economics prize is also documented, the author, like several of its recipients, believes it should be discontinued. Because the winners are dominated by lecturers at the University of Chicago, the prize is widely regarded as nothing more than a cozy sinecure for an incestuous bunch of American academics. The author strongly suggests that some of them - Gary Becker, Robert Fogel and Douglass North in particular - are little more than academic charlatans. Although the economics prize has proved problematic, the chemistry prize has also led to controversy, most notably when Fritz Haber won the prize in 1918 for his ammonia process. Along with five other future German Nobelists, he had previously used the same process to develop poison gas for use in the trench warfare of World War 1. Ironically, because Haber, who was a staunch Ge

This wonderful History of the Nobel Prize is without a doubt one of the most interesting books you will find. It details every portion of the prize, from literature to Physics to economics to Peace. It details the scandals associated with the prize and the politicking behind the prize. It also details the many amazing personalities that have received the prize as well as the ebbs and flows of certain movements within the awarding of the prize. A wonderful account and a must read.

Now that the Nobel Prizes for 2002 have just been announced, there is no better time to take a real look at the history and background of the Prizes themselves. There are very few books written about this important subject for the general reader, so even a mediocre one is appreciated. And this book is not mediocre. Of course there are the official records from the Nobel committees, but they are dry and sometimes too technical. This book gives the juicy behind-the-scene anecedotes, in addition to more thoughtful reflections over some of the important issues facing the Nobel selections. The question of selecting whom to award the Prizes is the most difficult and the most important task the Nobel committees face. The choices are often controversial, even over the scientific ones, as the book well illustrates. The Peace Prize is certainly not the only controversial one, although most people tend to think that all Physics, Chemistry, and Medicine Prizes are only given to the most deserving. Far from it!A few examples will suffice. The Medicine/Physiology Prize for the DNA resolution is awarded no long after Rosalind Franklin died. Why did the Nobel people wait when the evidence was already overwhelming? And the question of who deserved this is really thorny, given the fact that many people had worked towards the goal of resolving the DNA structure. Watson and Crick would have won the Prize in any case, but Watson certainly did not deserve as much credit as he thinks. (In fact he deserves much less. At least Crick has the wits and modesty to recognize his own contribution was small, if important.) Whom to give the third share is so difficult that the Nobel people must have breathed a sigh of relief when Franklin finally croaked. Shame on them! John Wheeler, one of the finest physicists of the twentieth century, deserves a Nobel but got none. The same goes for J. Robert Oppenheimer (whom Wheeler dislikes), though in this case his early death may have prevented this. The award should have been made for his astrophysical work on neutron stars, rather than for his nuclear physics. Einstein should have won the Nobel three times over instead of just once: once each for the Special Theory of Relativity, the General Theory of Relativity, and the photoelectric effect (for which he got the Prize). In the case of the Special Theory, he may have had to share it, though with whom is difficult (again) to say. (Perhaps Grossman?) The Nobel people were too incompetent to understand Relativity, as it happened. (Some on the committee thought he deserved it; others weren't so sure. Few - some not even physicists - really understood the math.)There are many other examples along these lines. The Einstein mistake was probably the biggest in the history of the Nobel Prizes. Nor is it clear that a Nobel is the strongest proof for a scientist's place in history. Bardeen shared the Physics Prize twice, but who has heard of him? Simply put, Bardeen was a great physicist, but no

The awarding of a Nobel Prize is one of the world's highest and most sought after honors among the sciences, arts, and humanitarian endeavors. Founded by Alfred Nobel (the creator of dynamite) the Nobel Prize has been received by men and women as diverse as Albert Einstein, Madam Curie, T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Mother Teresa, and Mandela. In The Nobel Prize: A History Of Genius, Controversy, And Prestige, scholar and author Burton Feldman takes the reader on a fascinating, informative tour of the award's history and the evolution of its decision making process (including the occasional controversy and outright blunder) from celebrating and promoting global disarmament among nations to honoring social reform within a particular nation. The Nobel Prize is a uniquely impressive, definitive, candid, and meticulous synthesis of biography, interdisciplinary analysis, and storytelling that is highly recommended to both scholarship and the non-specialist general reader.

Burton Feldman, hitherto a historian of ideas, here takes a stroll through the history of the most consistently prestigious accolade of the twentieth century- the Nobel Prize. The book is fast paced and gives a nice balance of gossip, information, and speculation, touching as well on the accomplishments of at least some of the laureates. The Nobels can be used as a cultural history of the last 100 years, or as a straight forward history, or as a gossipy expose-- scandals of the rich and prizegiving! Feldman tries to give a bit of each. His information on the prizes was accurate, so far as I could tell, and he does an honest job in trying to assess achievement in Peace, Lit, Physics, Chemistry and Econ. For some one with little background in these fields, he has accomplished a good deal. He misses some of the best anecdotes in Physics and Chem, clearly alien corn to him, but does a decent enough job. His treatment of the econ memorial prize is fun, but too brief and unfocussed to tell us much, and his comments about Paul Samuelson are both unfair and inaccurate (compared to some other econ prizewinners, Samuelson has been a veritable Tiresias in his predictions).He is fairly good in covering objections to the Econ prize, but never really marshals the reasoning. Thus his catalogue will cause reflection in those already familiar with the arguments, but will be cryptic to others. In his section on the Peace prize his choice of anecdotes seems arbitrary, and rather skewed to the political right. He also misses quite basic information on the prize, including facts given on the Nobel's own website. He gives the most attention to literature, unsurprisingly, spending most of his time berating the committee for overlooking various authors. His attempt to analyze the prize by finding elaborate political motives is heavy handed and sometimes ridiculous.The old cold warrior comes to the fore in this section. His listing of other worthy authors is admirable, but possibly beside the point. I must confess that his page and a half paen to neglected German authors, which included all my favorites, was beautiful and had me cheering him on.Any man who appreciates Rilke and Broch has to be pretty sound. Which just goes to show how personal the choice of greatness is in matters of literature. Feldman says several things that disagree with the offical Nobel history, and the reader is left to wonder which one is correct, especially since Feldman does not always show that he is familiar with the relevant section. For example, he says that no one in the Swedish Academy could read Tagore in the original, with the clear implication that this made them unfit to give that poet the prize, but the official history states that one member(Anders Osterling- sorry no umlaut) could read Bengali.Despite many quibbles and some serious problems with bias in the sections on Econ and peace, Feldman does a good job in writing a readable,and even slick, history of one of th