15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Fast Trip through the Nobel Prizes, December 6, 2000
By A Customer
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 the few honors whose luster has only increased with the passage of time. His accomplishment in grasping the basics of at least four alien fields should not be overlooked. Where else can you get intellectual history and dish-the-dirt gossip served up in such quantaties? On the whole, a fine piece of work, even if a few passages made me cringe. Feldman has mixed feelings about the continuing prestige of the prize, but is more positive than otherwise. I am somewhat more sanguine about the prize, and those who win it. I also feel that ambitious projects like Feldman's should be encouraged. May their succession never fail! And may the Nobel enjoy an even better 21st century.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Good stuff, October 1, 2005
This review is from: The Nobel Prize: A History of Genius, Controversyand Prestige (Paperback)
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 German patriot, also happened to be a Jew, he had to flee for his life to Britain when Hitler took over.
Max Planck, the Galileo of quantum physics, remained and the sad story of this gentle soul is also recounted here. His elder son was killed in action during the Great War; his only other son was implicated in the 1944 attempt to assassinate Hitler and was summarily executed as a result.
Such sad tales are interspersed with quirky anecdotes we lesser mortals expect to hear about such luminaries. Richard Feynman, for example, used to frequent topless bars; he found them conducive to solving complex mathematical equations. Werner Heisenberg received his Nobel Prize only seven years after almost failing his doctoral examinations. The dogfight that developed between the Canadian discoverers of insulin also makes lively and informative reading. The author recounts many such snippets about such greats as Bohr, Dirac and the great Albert Einstein, whose brain was put on public display after he died.
Feldman has given an enjoyable, readable and informative book. Not worthy of a Nobel Prize, perhaps, but thoroughly enjoyable nonetheless!
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7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Do your homework before publishing a book, plase!, April 23, 2003
By A Customer
The topic is fascinating, however is this book really "a well-researched guide to the merriment in Stockholm"? Let's look at a paragraph devoted to Polish winners in literature (and what is more obscure for an American than Poland?). I am not an expert, however on a single page I found a few errors and misinterpretations, e.g.:
1. Author thinks that Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855) belongs to the same generation as Zbigniew Herbert (d. 1999) and is younger than Czeslaw Milosz (Nobel Prize 1980).
2. Author mentions a great poet Tadeus Resewicz. Did he mean Tadeusz Rozewicz, poet and playwright?
3. Author states that Wladyslaw Reymont was known mostly for historical novels, but since high-school I have always thought his books were quite contemporary in the early 20th century.
4. Author does not have any idea about complex historical events that took place in Warsaw and Poland during and after WWII and its influence on writing of Czeslaw Milosz (as he ommits entire catastrophy of Warsaw and he has never heard about Gajcy or Baczynski). It is obvious, he is not an expert on literature nor history.
How many errors are there in an entire book? I do not know. One can only guess, but it is hard to consider this book a worthy scientific resource. It is apparent, that he did not do his homework. How can I trust the rest of it?
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