: Ralph Gunther
: The Magic Zone Sketches of the Nobel Laureates
: Digitalia
: 9781882528400
: 1
: CHF 80.90
:
: Politik
: English
: 298
: DRM
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: PDF

The present volume introduces the reader to a wide range of information about the men and women who have won Nobel Prizes. Excerpts from their life histories, from their achievements in the sciences and the arts, are interspersed with an array of anecdotes and chance occurrences which make for highly entertaining reading. The national anthems of three countries are the creations of Nobel laureates. While in office, the presidents of six countries were awarded Nobel prizes. It will attract attention that among the Nobel laureates one can find astronomers, aircraft pilots, performers of music, philosophers, revolutionaries, inventors, art collectors, mountaineers, not to mention the occasional gold digger, terrorist, lumberjack, fruit picker, and explorer of unchartered territories. 

It was a Nobel laureate who first addressed Mohandas Gandhi as“Mahatma” (Great Soul), anticipating the role that the future leader of the passive resistance movement would play on the Indian subcontinent. It was a Nobel laureate who identified and isolated the chemical species in coffee, that is to say, the species that give coffee its flavor and aroma. Between 1901 and 2002, more than seven hundred people were awarded Nobel Prizes. Covering a time span of 102 years, the book contains more than two hundred wellresearched sketches– and the notion that if history is the essence of many biographies, the biographies of the Nobel laureates along can throw a prominent light on the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first.
SKETCHES OF THE NOBEL LAUREATES (p. 11)

Verner von Heidenstam came into the world at Olshammar, on the estate of his grandmother, north of Lake Vättern, in Sweden. His family was of ancient noble lineage, they were aristocrats, wealthy, well-connected in military and diplomatic circles. Early in 1876, while attending school in Stockholm, it was feared that he had a condition which might lead to lung disease. On medical advice, a speedy departure to milder climates was decided.

Thus, at age 16, the age of greatest receptivity, the boy traveled in France, Italy, Greece, and what was then the Ottoman Empire, a journey that would span several years. Years of excitement, of adventure, of a keen delight in discovery. And the cultures on the Mediterranean steered the course of his life: he became a poet! In 1888 his first book,"Pilgrimage and Wander Years", a collection of sensuous verse in praise of the Orient, caused a sensation in Sweden.

A quarter of a century later, captivated by the Orientalism in Rabindranath Tagore`s poetry, he drew up a special report on the poet from India - and affected the selection of an Asian for the Nobel Prize 3 years before he received the prize himself.

It was in 1915 that Rabindranath Tagore first met Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, whom he admired, although he disagreed with much of what he advocated. In March, the London-trained barrister from Gujarat arrived in Santiniketan, the honored guest of the Visva-Bharati School. There the Bengali poet addressed him as `MAHATMA` (Great Soul), anticipating the rôle which the future leader of the passive resistance movement would play on the Indian subcontinent.

That year the Nobel laureate, who would become one of Gandhi `s shrewdest critics, was knighted by King George V. The Visva-Bharati School had opened its doors in 1901, not far from Calcutta, the city where in 1915 Chandrasekhara Raman was a civil servant and Mother Teresa`s name was not yet whispered.

At the time of Gandhi`s visit it had 125 students. In the mid-1980s it had more than 3000 students, more than 400 teachers, more than 455,000 volumes in its library, and the names Visva-Bharati and Santiniketan were spoken in academic circles everywhere! That Rabindranath Tagore, the school`s founder, surrendered his knighthood in 1919, in protest against the Amritsar massacre, and that Gandhi began to advocate self-rule for India in 1919, was by then history.

At different times in the twentieth century, family members of the Nobel laureates found themselves swept into violence. The fathers of Albert Camus, Werner Forssmann and Claude Simon were killed in World War I.

Rudyard Kipling`s son was killed in that war, and a son of Theodore Roosevelt as well as two sons of Emil Fischer, also a son of Sir William H. Bragg, a son of Max Planck, a son of Arthur Henderson and the two sons of Walther Nernst, who never knew that they had been the descendants, albeit briefly, of Nobel laureates.
Table of Contents8
Acknowledgements10
Introduction12
Sketches of the Nobel Laureates18
Appendices224
Selected Bibliography287