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Amazon.co.uk Review
Max Perutz is an extraordinary scientist. After training in chemistry at the University of Vienna during the 1930s, he went to Cambridge and became fascinated by biochemistry just as that discipline was becoming ripe for conquest by scientific heroes. He knew and worked with many of them--William Bragg, J D Bernal, Crick and Watson--and became one himself, through his discovery of the structure of haemoglobin, which led to his Nobel Prize in 1962.
Such are the credentials Perutz brings to this wonderful collection of essays; credentials which he uses always to illuminate, never to dominate. In prose that rolls by like countryside seen from the window of a train, Perutz takes the reader travelling through his own life and that of many other leading scientists, giving fresh insights into the workings of first-rate minds.
We meet such characters as Leo Szilard, the inventor of the atomic bomb who devoted his life to preventing its use, and the German chemist Fritz Haber, the very mirror-image of Szilard who became a real-life Faust. We also learn much about Perutz's own approach to science--including his involvement in a project to harness icebergs in the fight against the Nazis.
With its combination of choice of subject and light, often humorous style, this is one of the best collections of scientific essays to emerge for years. --Robert Matthews --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
Perutz's extraordinary historical grasp and the breadth of his personal experience and cultural perspective give his reviews an interest that often transcends that of the books themselves. He brings luminously to life such figures as Fritz Haber, Lise Meitner and Leo Szilard. He writes with wonderfully lucid precision about science and offers also a fine polemic, first read to the American Philosophical Society, on the meaning of freedom... This is a wholly captivating book; it has warmth, wit and style, and not a dull sentence. I urge you to read, enjoy and learn. Nature The essays are beautifully written, with flashes of wit and humor. Many of the essays were written for the New York Review of Books; anyone addicted to that journal, as I am, will at once get a feel for the style of these essays. I read this as a bedtime book, so I dipped into it at random. When I finally found that there was no more to read, I felt quite disappointed - no more chocolates in the box!" Nature Medicine
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First Sentence
These lines from Tony Harrison's play Square Rounds epitomize the ambiguous personality and career of Fritz Haber. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
These lines from Tony Harrison's play Square Rounds epitomize the ambiguous personality and career of Fritz Haber. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This entertaining, enlightening and wittily-written book is always engaging and is highly informative. The reviews and narratives are thoughtfully written and well-researched wherever necessary. This book awoke a keen interest in the intriguing scientific period around the second world war, and inspired me to read many of the books Max Perutz commented on.
0 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
It is ok, but he can be a bit of a pain like all Nobels become. He is a bit of a prima donna and uses fancy terms like lingua franca which is fine if you studied latin. But he explains the function of blood protein beautifully and some of his dislikes are like mine in terms of Freud, who was a silly old fool who made up a load of rubbish about mental illness and talking therapy, which has been disputed by medical science thank heavens.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
1 review
28 of 28 people found the following review helpful
Charming prose, plenty of surprises
6 April 2000
Format:Hardcover
Perutz is not only a biochemist and a Nobel Laureate physicist, but a witty and graceful writer to boot, and readers will be in for a treat. But more than the character sketches of great scientific minds like Szilard and Monod, I appreciated two startling stories in particular, one of which is told in more fascinating detail than I'd encountered before, and the other, which is shocking and, if true, deserving of wider publicity. The first story details the work of Nobel prize-winning chemist Fritz Haber, whose synthesis of ammonia enabled Germany to sustain its military effort in WWI. Haber, a gentle man of tremendous culture and erudition, was also ambitious. Perutz describes in more detail than is readily available elsewhere Haber's efforts to sustain chemical warfare experiments after the war under the guise of agricultural research. Tragically, he supervised the development of Zyklon B, a deadly gas that would later be used to exterminate millions of people of Jewish descent, including some of Haber's own relatives. Fortunately for him, Haber died in exile before learning the full extent, and horror, of his folly. More startling to me was the story of Albert Schatz who, Perutz contends, is the real discoverer of streptomycin. Schatz, writes Perutz, "was the son of poor Jewish farmers in Connecticut and had studied soil microbiology to find ways of increasing the yields on his father's unproductive farm. He embarked on the search for antibiotics only because Waksman made it a condition of his meager offer of $40 a month to work in his laboratory; but then Schatz threw himself into the research, testing hundreds of different soil micro-organisms for antibacterial activity." Perutz claims that Schatz displayed all the initiative and effort warranted for a Nobel Prize, and that Waksman did nothing more than sit in his office while the experiments were going on. Later, claims Perutz, Waksman denied Schatz the recognition he so richly deserved. Unless I missed something, I wonder why Perutz is telling us this only now? Wouldn't it have been better for this information to have been revealed when Waksman was alive to defend himself? And can we expect forthcoming reference books to take note and set the record straight?
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