THE NOBEL PRIZE

An accessible history of the most glamorous of international awards.

As the introduction announces, “the Nobel Prizes are the most coveted and most potent awards of our time,” trumpeted in the media and conferring immediate prestige on their recipients. Yet the selection process and the reverberations of the awards within their disciplines or in the larger culture have seldom been examined. Independent scholar Feldman fills the gap with his chronicle of the origins and evolution of the annual prizes, asking, “Are blue ribbons, no matter how exalted, relevant to intellectual or artistic or even peace work?” The answer remains murky, but Feldman’s exceptionally clear, readable prose makes the contentious history of the awards a breezy, entertaining narrative. The chapter on physics, with its colorful personalities, is especially lively; resisting the temptation to indulge in clichéd portraits of scientific geniuses, Feldman highlights ongoing competition in the field between experimenters (derided by more abstract types as “plumbers”) and theorists (who “couldn’t run a hamburger stand,” say the experimenters). The relatively low-key section about the chemistry prize reveals the gradual emergence of the discipline’s dominant trends, a salutary reminder of the role hindsight plays in gauging the significance of scientific achievements. Oddly, this sense of historical perspective falters in the discussion of the literature awards. Feldman treats the Nobel committee’s failure to give prizes to Virginia Woolf and James Joyce as egregious lapses rather than as evidence of authentic differences between the literary tastes of the 1920s and ’30s and those of the present day. Such anachronistic indignation, however, seems thoroughly justified when it comes to the prize in physiology or medicine, given in 1949 to the inventor of the prefrontal lobotomy in a decision that stifled protests against “ice-pick psychiatry.” A brief, underdeveloped conclusion does not do justice to such provocative accounts.

An engaging overview that, unfortunately, backs away from the deeper questions it raises. (8 pp. b&w photos, not seen)