Book to Note

Daniel Charles. Master Mind: The Rise and Fall of Fritz Haber, the Nobel Laureate Who Launched the Age of Chemical Warfare. New York: Harper Collins, 2005. xvii + 306 pp. $24.95.

Reviewed by Matthew Soniak

According to Daniel Charles, Fritz Haber (1868–1934) has been not so much forgotten as driven from public view. His ghost hovers above headlines, history books, and kitchen tables all over the world. His development of a process to synthesize ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen helps feed billions of people every day; his work on German armaments and chemical weapons programs helped cause millions of casualties in two world wars. He was at once a hero and a villain, a Jew and a German nationalist, persecuted by the Nazis and placed on a list of war criminals by the victors of World War I; in short a fascinating and tragic figure. In this smoothly paced and economically written popular biography, Charles sets Haber’s story and achievements within a larger portrait of an era. Haber’s scientific work is explained for a nonscientific audience, but the author pays more attention to its economic and military implications. At times Charles’s speculations about Haber’s historical importance seem stretched. His claim that Haber is at the root of the marriage of science and the military ignores a history dating back at least as far as Archimedes’ scientific advice to the army of Syracuse during the Second Punic War.