Customer Reviews

Fritz Haber: Chemist, Nobel Laureate, German, Jew: A Biography

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Fritz Haber was one of the great chemists. This biography, written by the son of one of his co-workers is magnificent in that it is thorough, informative, extremely well-researched, replete with references to additional literature.

Well worth reading by anyone interested by the First World War - the allies went into the war thinking that if worst came to worst, Germany would run out of nitrates, which were then the only known source for the nitrogen needed to make gunpowder, and ergo gunpowder, and be forced to surrender. Little did they reckon with Fritz Haber's genius - he devised a method to extract nitrogen out of the air - and the war tragically continued. Stoltzenberg devotes some thought to what sense this accomplishment made, but other authors may have devoted more pages to this subject. This book will appeal to any reader fascinated by German history, or by the history of chemistry.

Anyone seriously interested in Fritz Haber's life and times should read this book. Scholarly, based on extensive review of materials in archives and libraries, as well as conversations with eyewitnesses; full of meticulously documented detail; and yet, despite this, thoroughly readable.

My only regret is that this English-language version is an abridged version of the German original. This is one of the few books that one would have preferred to be longer.

This biography illuminates the life of one of the most gifted yet controversial figures of the 20th century. Haber was a pioneer in electrochemistry and thermodynamics and won the Nobel Prize for his synthesis of ammonia, a process essential for both fertilizer and explosives. Haber's work has helped feed billions of people, but he is often remembered for his role in the poison gas attacks of World War I. Despite his ardent patriotism, Haber, a jew by birth, was exiled from his homeland in 1933 by the Nazi party.