Steven Shapin writes: Daniel Charles’s book has the advantage over Fritz Haber: Chemist, Nobel Laureate, German, Jew, the only other serious treatment of Haber in English – an abridged translation of a worthy but rather stodgy 1994 biography by the chemist Dietrich Stoltzenberg, whose father Hugo was Haber’s colleague in working on poison gas. Charles is a journalist, and was drawn to Haber by way of an earlier book, Lords of the Harvest: Biotechnology, Big Money, and the Future of Food (2001). This accessible, engaged, and often elegantly written book finds the question of Haber’s moral and social identity compelling. And if Charles passes severe judgment on both Haber’s public and private life, he largely does so by mobilising the assessments of many of those who knew him well.

Cape | hardback |ISBN: 9780224064446