[REVIEW] Daniel Charles, Master Mind

[rfmcdonald]

Daniel Charles' Master Mind is a sympathetic biography of Nobel laureate Fritz Haber. Charles has examined the life of this brilliant chemist, responsible for the manufacture of ammonia and its uses as base for both fertilizer and chemical weapons, before as a National Public Radio journalist. Master Mind does not depart from Charles' previous work, showing Haber as a man caught by his conflicting loyalties between his love of science as a transnational culture and his fierce German patriotism. The latter was eventually his undoing, for as an assimilated person of Jewish background in an increasingly anti-Semitic Germany, Haber found himself steadily pushed away from the country and the scientific community that he so loved. The book might be unoriginal that way, but its subject matter is profoundly interesting. It's worth reading.