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Burton Feldman
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The Nobel Prize: A History of Genius, Controversy, and Prestige Paperback – October 9, 2012

by Burton Feldman (Author)
4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 14 ratings
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Founded by the brilliant, misanthropic inventor of dynamite, the Nobel Prize has for a hundred years claimed to identify the summit of human achievement. But what exactly is the Nobel Institution? How does it choose its winners? Has it ever made a mistake? And why does the prize hold such importance? With deft insight and sparkling wit, Burton Feldman considers these questions while taking us on a fascinating tour of every aspect of Alfred Nobel's grand legacy: its founder, its aura, its fields of award—literature, physics, chemistry, medicine, peace, and economics—and its laureates' personalities and rivalries, as well as its biases, controversies, and blunders.  
 The first comprehensive and critical survey ever written of the world's most famous award, The Nobel Prize is a masterly synthesis of biography, storytelling, and interdisciplinary analysis, ranging easily and confidently from literature to science to politics to economics. This monumental, witty, and eloquent book will remain the definitive work on the prize for decades to come, remarkable for its comprehensiveness, depth of insight, and never-failing capacity to surprise and entertain.
Previous page
  1. Print length
    512 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Arcade
  4. Publication date
    October 9, 2012
  5. Dimensions
    6 x 6.1 x 9 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    1611457246
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1611457247
  8. See all details
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About the Author

Burton Feldman earned his PhD in the History of Ideas and Science at the University of Chicago. He taught at the Universities of Chicago, Maryland, Denver, Colorado at Boulder, and at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and wrote on religion and myth, literary criticism, and politics. He passed away in 2003.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Arcade; 1st edition (October 9, 2012)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 512 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1611457246
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1611457247
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.53 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 6.1 x 9 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 14 ratings

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Burton Feldman

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4.6 out of 5 stars
4.6 out of 5
14 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United States on March 31, 2016
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Not a great book. However, it did arrive on time:)
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Declan Hayes
5.0 out of 5 stars Good stuff
Reviewed in the United States on October 1, 2005
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!
16 people found this helpful
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mianfei
4.0 out of 5 stars A good overview of what are now controversial prizes
Reviewed in the United States on November 7, 2009
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.
7 people found this helpful
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Seth J. Frantzman
5.0 out of 5 stars A wonderful account
Reviewed in the United States on December 5, 2003
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.
3 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 7, 2016
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Perfect!
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Brian R. Martin
4.0 out of 5 stars An Overview of the Nobel Prizes
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 16, 2012
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This is one of a number of books that first appeared around the time of the centenary of the Nobel Prizes. It is ambitious in reviewing all six of the Prizes: physics, chemistry, medical science, literature, economics, and peace. It starts with a short, but informative, chapter on the life of Alfred Nobel and follows this with another brief chapter on the struggles that followed for a considerable time to reconcile the interests of various parties, not least of which were Nobel's relatives, before a Nobel Foundation could be set up and the Prizes established. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences does not come out well here, with their attempt to `seize' a larger share of the money to establish research institutes to improve the quality of science in Sweden, not what Nobel intended. In the final compromise, a considerable sum was allocated for administering the Prizes and paying committee members; Nobel's relatives received relative little.

The bulk of the book is the six separate chapters on each of the Prizes, plus a chapter giving an overview of the science prizes. The method in each is to divide the subject into historical time periods and describe the achievements that led to Prizes, even though the award may have been made many years later and outside the time period. This sets the awards in the historical context of the development of the subject and produces a more coherent picture. The narrative is a lively mixture of factual information, anecdotes (supported by references), and some speculations, both personal and quoted. Inevitably, the anecdotes and speculations are somewhat arbitrary, but at least in the physics chapter, about which I know most, they seemed a reasonable mix.

The Nobel Prizes are no stranger to controversy, and this is clearly evident in the Prizes for literature and peace. Forr example, one-seventh of all Nobel Literature Prizes (fourteen at the time of this book) had been awarded to Scandinavians, whereas numerous world-famous authors have not been honoured. Until the relevant archives are released under the 50-year embargo rule, one can only speculate why a particular person was awarded a Prize, but even then without minutes of the committee's meeting (no notes are allowed to be taken or minutes recorded) a definite conclusion is impossible.

I did note a few errors of fact in chapters covering material I was familiar with and some reviewers on the American website claimed to have found many more in the chapters on literature and economics, as well as bias in the chapters on the economics and peace prizes. Despite this, Feldman has written a very interesting and enjoyable book. A new (presumably updated) edition is due to be published late in 2012, where hopefully any errors in the present book will be corrected.
3 people found this helpful
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Dennis Mobberley
4.0 out of 5 stars Worthwhile
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 14, 2018
Verified Purchase
An interesting book, long but without padding.
Could be stringer on the science prizes,
but is one of the few available tomes ( in a non-Scandinavian language )
on the subject
2 people found this helpful
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