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The Nobel Prize: A History of Genius, Controversyand Prestige

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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.

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!

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?

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 not one of the greatest of the twentieth century. Pauling won the Chemistry Prize once only, but he was the greatest chemist of modern times, by far.

There is really no need to fuss over the Peace, Literature, and Economics Prizes as Feldman does, for the prestige (if this word may be used at all) attached to these is considerably lower in any case. The Peace Prize will always be controversial no matter how deserving or undeserving the recipients may be. But that doesn't mean we should do without one.

This book doesn't tell the whole story. For instance, why are there no Nobels for Philosophy, Astronomy, and Mathematics? Read the book, but don't expect a detailed explanation there. This book is not about Alfred Nobel himself, but a little more biographical details than what Feldman provides would be helpful. The question of why the Japanese, with the second most powerful technological economy in world, should be so under-represented in the awards (even in the sciences) is not at all touched upon. There has been much discussion recently (like in a recent article in the New York Times) about this question. As if in reply, two of the science Prizes are shared by Japanese scientists this very year. (On a per capita basis, the Germans do much better, but still lag behind the British or the Swiss.) A breakdown of the prizes on national basis is available from the official Nobel Prize website, but Feldman may want to consider doing a per capita analysis in a new edition (if available). He does list the recipients of Jewish ancestry (or partial Jewish ancestry) in the last Appendix (Appendix E). This is a real eye-opener. Anyone who doubts that Jews are intellectually gifted should take a good look at this list. Considering the small number of Jews in the world, their achievement is astonishing, especially in medicine. Not even the Scots, who do relatively well, can remotely compare. Like most stereotypes, there must be some truth to the one about Jews (particularly the Ashkenazi kind) being smart. However, few of the Jewish winners represent Israel or did their groundbreaking research there.

In any case, no single book can tell the whole story about the Nobel Prizes. There are others (one recent one by a Hungarian chemist) but not nearly enough for us. Although Feldman is no scientist himself, he did us a fine service, and I give him a small honorary Nobel, for investigative history. May there be more like him!

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.

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.

This book apparently tries to accomplish three main goals: (a) teach key ideas of the subject matter covered by the Nobel prizes, (b) describe many specific Nobel prize winners and their accomplishments, and (c) provide gossipy information on why various people did and didn't receive the prize.

The result is a book which is long, detailed, and generally fascinating to all people with wide interests and appreciation for human achievement, but the attempt to accomplish all three goals simultaneously turns out to mean that none of them is ideally achieved. Instead, the book has a rather incoherent hodgepodge feel, with the reader often unclear about how one topic relates to the next. Moreover, much of the material is likely to be difficult to follow for readers who don't have at least some relevant background. Nevertheless, the book is still a major achievement because of the sheer breadth and depth of material it covers, and does so in a sufficiently sophisticated manner.

A book like this can't really be summarized, or at least I'm not up for trying, but one key finding is certainly that subjectivity and politics have been major factors in awarding the prizes, especially the literature and peace prizes, with the result that not all winners were equally deserving, and many deserving people were never winners (and I agree with another reviewer's comment that Einstein should have won three times).

But let's still be glad for the Nobel prizes (maybe even the pseudo-Nobel prize for economics), since they uplift human aspirations and ultimately help bring out the best in us.

Recommended, if this kind of thing is your cup of tea.

Although I had known of the Nobel Prizes for many years and was vaguely aware of the controversies surrounding them, it is only reading Piero Scaruffi's comments that has made me really interested in their history and the controversies surrounding them. What Scaruffi said, in a manner reminiscent of the Politically Incorrect Guides, is that in modern times the Prizes had become far too distorted by political correctness to be of any value.

As a result, I became quite eager to investigate the Nobel Prizes in serious detail, and Burton Feldman's book seemed from the start of my investigation to be the best possible study. On the whole, I can say that I am satisfied with his accounts of the history of the Nobel Prizes and the controversies they have generated over time. Although the science prizes have never been a fraction so controversial as those relating to literature and peace, there was some quite interesting stories about them - though it is hard to see how much debate one can develop in the hard sciences over who deserves important prizes.

On the other hand, the literature and peace prizes are sufficient in themselves to make "The Nobel Prize: A History of Genius, Controversy and Prestige" worth more than a read. Feldman does quite an impressive job at showing how bias in the committee has prevented many of the best writers of the twentieth century from winning the Literature Prize. In fact, he shows that political correctness existed in the Nobel Committee long before it became important in the field of academia, and that it had led to the absence of many important writers from the English-speaking world, especially the United States, from the list of nominees for the Literature Prize. Instead, there is in this field a prevalence of writers who know the Scandinavian languages, and translation thereinto has become a valuable asset for winning the Prize. It is especially revealing to see some of the behind-the-scenes undertakings of the judges in this process.

The same problems with the Literature Prize also apply to the Peace Prize, and whilst they are equally interesting I would say that they are not as well-done because there is less explanation of the biases that are undoubtedly present in the Nobel Committee. Nor is there such a good look at the most controversial cases, such as the awards to henry Kissinger and Yasser Arafat.

Still, if you want to understand the Nobel Prizes, "The Nobel Prize: A History of Genius, Controversy and Prestige" does stand as the best possible read.

Burton Feldman does a solid job of overviewing the entire first century of the Nobel Prizes. (He's not perfect; per one negative reviewer, his grasp of Polish literature appears pretty shaky.) But, it is quite solid, if not encyclopedic (contra people who thought that's what this book was supposed to be).

The politics, and the evolution of some of the prizes, are a major part of the story.

Feldman is very good at describing the Peace Prize becoming more awarded for social justice within one country, and applauds that.

Literature, especially in its first half-century, draws many "huh" comments for its awards. Feldman documents politics involved here, including often "balancing" one winner with another the next year. Later, in the second half-century, fears of strong conservatives may have cost a few writers the prize.

And, if you think the sciences are Spockian, the politics, from campaigning by scientists for prizes to the infighting in the Swedish Academy, is quite illuminating.

Beyond that, it's a glimpse at how various scientific communities can become fixated on certain issues and approaches to them.

Finally, Feldman looks at the stepsister economics prize, and suggests that, if it isn't abolished, it should at least be removed from an every-year award basis.

Again, not an encyclopedia, and not perfect on every issue, but very solid.

"The Nobel Prize: A History of Genius, Controversy and Prestige" by Burton Feldman, Arcade Publishing, New York, 2000.

While the author discusses the award of the Medicine prize to Fibiger in 1926, he fails to include a vital reference to the book "Otto Warburg Cell Physiologist Biochemist and Eccentric" by Hans Krebs and Roswitha Schmid, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1981.
In this reference, it is documented that the 1926 Medicine and Physiology Nobel Prize was proposed to be shared with Otto Warburg for "his work on the metabolism of cancer cells; the proposal was that the Prize should be divided with Fibiger but the Faculty preferred to give Fibiger the undivided Prize for his discovery of the Spiroptera carcinoma..."
While the author notes that Otto Warburg received the 1931 Prize in M & P, he also fails to note that he was also nominated for the 1944 Prize: "In 1944 he was again found to deserve the honour for identification of the flavins and of nicotinamide as hydrogen carriers in biological oxidations, but Hitler's decree which forbade the acceptance of Nobel Prizes by German citizens intervened." (Krebs, page 49). He also fails to mention that Hans Krebs was one of Otto Warburg's three Nobel Prize winning pupils, along with Otto Meyerof and Hugo Thorell.
While Feldman makes a flippant speculation about why "Hitler allowed him to stay in Germany", he fails to mention that Otto Warburg's seminal discovery in 1923, for which he was nominated for the 1926 Prize, that nearly all cancer cells metabolize by anerobic glycolysis, has been confirmed over and over again in the intervening years. Had Otto Warburg, M.D., Ph. D., who has been described elsewhere as "The greatest biochemist of the twentieth century" before the century was over, received that "first Cancer Prize", the sordid history of cancer treatment might have been forever changed for the better. For example, while the medical orthodoxy has rejected his conclusions, Dr. Warburg believed until his death in 1970, that the prime cause of cancer was the shifting from the primarily oxygen based metabolism to the primarily glucose based metabolism and this is not necessarily contradicted by genetics since genetics cannot manufacture necessary nutrients like oxygen (or others) at a cell site; these must be provided from external sources. Even if Dr. Warburg was wrong about the "prime cause" of cancer, the shifting from the primarily aerobic state to the primarily anerobic state for most cancer cells is an experimental fact not in dispute.
Yet, virtually every serious effort to scientifically test and use this vital fundamental information about cell metabolism in treatment and prevention of cancer, from Max Gerson, M.D., "A Cancer Therapy Results of Fifty Cases", 1958 (used by him in the 1940's to treat cancer in New York and testified before the U. S. Congress in 1946) to the efforts of Joe Gold, M.D. to "block the glycolic pathway" with a common and inexpensive drug, Hydrazine Sulfate from 1968+ has been obstructed by the medical orthodoxy as documented in "The Cancer Industry" by Ralph W. Moss, Ph. D., Equinox Press, 1996 first published as "The Cancer Syndrome", 1980 (and other places as well). By the way, the quackwatch website, operated by one Stephen Barrett, M.D., seeks to vilify both Ralph W. Moss, Ph. D., and his book above, and Otto Warburg and his experimental conclusions, through the words of one Saul Green, Ph. D., who makes misleading statements in a review of The Cancer Industry.(By the way, this book is documented with hundreds of references).
In fact, Dr. Warburg himself proposed using it for prevention in the above reference by Krebs (pp. 24-25), but these recommendations have fallen on deaf ears by most so-called medical doctors.
The omission of this vital material has a negative impact on this book even though the book contains other useful information.