The topic is fascinating, however is this book really "a well-researched guide to the merriment in Stockholm"? Let's look at a paragraph devoted to Polish winners in literature (and what is more obscure for an American than Poland?). I am not an expert, however on a single page I found a few errors and misinterpretations, e.g.:

1. Author thinks that Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855) belongs to the same generation as Zbigniew Herbert (d. 1999) and is younger than Czeslaw Milosz (Nobel Prize 1980).

2. Author mentions a great poet Tadeus Resewicz. Did he mean Tadeusz Rozewicz, poet and playwright?

3. Author states that Wladyslaw Reymont was known mostly for historical novels, but since high-school I have always thought his books were quite contemporary in the early 20th century.

4. Author does not have any idea about complex historical events that took place in Warsaw and Poland during and after WWII and its influence on writing of Czeslaw Milosz (as he ommits entire catastrophy of Warsaw and he has never heard about Gajcy or Baczynski). It is obvious, he is not an expert on literature nor history.

How many errors are there in an entire book? I do not know. One can only guess, but it is hard to consider this book a worthy scientific resource. It is apparent, that he did not do his homework. How can I trust the rest of it?

"The Nobel Prize: A History of Genius, Controversy and Prestige" by Burton Feldman, Arcade Publishing, New York, 2000.

While the author discusses the award of the Medicine prize to Fibiger in 1926, he fails to include a vital reference to the book "Otto Warburg Cell Physiologist Biochemist and Eccentric" by Hans Krebs and Roswitha Schmid, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1981.
In this reference, it is documented that the 1926 Medicine and Physiology Nobel Prize was proposed to be shared with Otto Warburg for "his work on the metabolism of cancer cells; the proposal was that the Prize should be divided with Fibiger but the Faculty preferred to give Fibiger the undivided Prize for his discovery of the Spiroptera carcinoma..."
While the author notes that Otto Warburg received the 1931 Prize in M & P, he also fails to note that he was also nominated for the 1944 Prize: "In 1944 he was again found to deserve the honour for identification of the flavins and of nicotinamide as hydrogen carriers in biological oxidations, but Hitler's decree which forbade the acceptance of Nobel Prizes by German citizens intervened." (Krebs, page 49). He also fails to mention that Hans Krebs was one of Otto Warburg's three Nobel Prize winning pupils, along with Otto Meyerof and Hugo Thorell.
While Feldman makes a flippant speculation about why "Hitler allowed him to stay in Germany", he fails to mention that Otto Warburg's seminal discovery in 1923, for which he was nominated for the 1926 Prize, that nearly all cancer cells metabolize by anerobic glycolysis, has been confirmed over and over again in the intervening years. Had Otto Warburg, M.D., Ph. D., who has been described elsewhere as "The greatest biochemist of the twentieth century" before the century was over, received that "first Cancer Prize", the sordid history of cancer treatment might have been forever changed for the better. For example, while the medical orthodoxy has rejected his conclusions, Dr. Warburg believed until his death in 1970, that the prime cause of cancer was the shifting from the primarily oxygen based metabolism to the primarily glucose based metabolism and this is not necessarily contradicted by genetics since genetics cannot manufacture necessary nutrients like oxygen (or others) at a cell site; these must be provided from external sources. Even if Dr. Warburg was wrong about the "prime cause" of cancer, the shifting from the primarily aerobic state to the primarily anerobic state for most cancer cells is an experimental fact not in dispute.
Yet, virtually every serious effort to scientifically test and use this vital fundamental information about cell metabolism in treatment and prevention of cancer, from Max Gerson, M.D., "A Cancer Therapy Results of Fifty Cases", 1958 (used by him in the 1940's to treat cancer in New York and testified before the U. S. Congress in 1946) to the efforts of Joe Gold, M.D. to "block the glycolic pathway" with a common and inexpensive drug, Hydrazine Sulfate from 1968+ has been obstructed by the medical orthodoxy as documented in "The Cancer Industry" by Ralph W. Moss, Ph. D., Equinox Press, 1996 first published as "The Cancer Syndrome", 1980 (and other places as well). By the way, the quackwatch website, operated by one Stephen Barrett, M.D., seeks to vilify both Ralph W. Moss, Ph. D., and his book above, and Otto Warburg and his experimental conclusions, through the words of one Saul Green, Ph. D., who makes misleading statements in a review of The Cancer Industry.(By the way, this book is documented with hundreds of references).
In fact, Dr. Warburg himself proposed using it for prevention in the above reference by Krebs (pp. 24-25), but these recommendations have fallen on deaf ears by most so-called medical doctors.
The omission of this vital material has a negative impact on this book even though the book contains other useful information.

Now that the Nobel Prizes for 2002 have just been announced, there is no better time to take a real look at the history and background of the Prizes themselves. There are very few books written about this important subject for the general reader, so even a mediocre one is appreciated. And this book is not mediocre. Of course there are the official records from the Nobel committees, but they are dry and sometimes too technical. This book gives the juicy behind-the-scene anecedotes, in addition to more thoughtful reflections over some of the important issues facing the Nobel selections.

The question of selecting whom to award the Prizes is the most difficult and the most important task the Nobel committees face. The choices are often controversial, even over the scientific ones, as the book well illustrates. The Peace Prize is certainly not the only controversial one, although most people tend to think that all Physics, Chemistry, and Medicine Prizes are only given to the most deserving. Far from it!

A few examples will suffice. The Medicine/Physiology Prize for the DNA resolution is awarded no long after Rosalind Franklin died. Why did the Nobel people wait when the evidence was already overwhelming? And the question of who deserved this is really thorny, given the fact that many people had worked towards the goal of resolving the DNA structure. Watson and Crick would have won the Prize in any case, but Watson certainly did not deserve as much credit as he thinks. (In fact he deserves much less. At least Crick has the wits and modesty to recognize his own contribution was small, if important.) Whom to give the third share is so difficult that the Nobel people must have breathed a sigh of relief when Franklin finally croaked. Shame on them!

John Wheeler, one of the finest physicists of the twentieth century, deserves a Nobel but got none. The same goes for J. Robert Oppenheimer (whom Wheeler dislikes), though in this case his early death may have prevented this. The award should have been made for his astrophysical work on neutron stars, rather than for his nuclear physics. Einstein should have won the Nobel three times over instead of just once: once each for the Special Theory of Relativity, the General Theory of Relativity, and the photoelectric effect (for which he got the Prize). In the case of the Special Theory, he may have had to share it, though with whom is difficult (again) to say. (Perhaps Grossman?) The Nobel people were too incompetent to understand Relativity, as it happened. (Some on the committee thought he deserved it; others weren't so sure. Few - some not even physicists - really understood the math.)

There are many other examples along these lines. The Einstein mistake was probably the biggest in the history of the Nobel Prizes. Nor is it clear that a Nobel is the strongest proof for a scientist's place in history. Bardeen shared the Physics Prize twice, but who has heard of him? Simply put, Bardeen was a great physicist, but not one of the greatest of the twentieth century. Pauling won the Chemistry Prize once only, but he was the greatest chemist of modern times, by far.

There is really no need to fuss over the Peace, Literature, and Economics Prizes as Feldman does, for the prestige (if this word may be used at all) attached to these is considerably lower in any case. The Peace Prize will always be controversial no matter how deserving or undeserving the recipients may be. But that doesn't mean we should do without one.

This book doesn't tell the whole story. For instance, why are there no Nobels for Philosophy, Astronomy, and Mathematics? Read the book, but don't expect a detailed explanation there. This book is not about Alfred Nobel himself, but a little more biographical details than what Feldman provides would be helpful. The question of why the Japanese, with the second most powerful technological economy in world, should be so under-represented in the awards (even in the sciences) is not at all touched upon. There has been much discussion recently (like in a recent article in the New York Times) about this question. As if in reply, two of the science Prizes are shared by Japanese scientists this very year. (On a per capita basis, the Germans do much better, but still lag behind the British or the Swiss.) A breakdown of the prizes on national basis is available from the official Nobel Prize website, but Feldman may want to consider doing a per capita analysis in a new edition (if available). He does list the recipients of Jewish ancestry (or partial Jewish ancestry) in the last Appendix (Appendix E). This is a real eye-opener. Anyone who doubts that Jews are intellectually gifted should take a good look at this list. Considering the small number of Jews in the world, their achievement is astonishing, especially in medicine. Not even the Scots, who do relatively well, can remotely compare. Like most stereotypes, there must be some truth to the one about Jews (particularly the Ashkenazi kind) being smart. However, few of the Jewish winners represent Israel or did their groundbreaking research there.

In any case, no single book can tell the whole story about the Nobel Prizes. There are others (one recent one by a Hungarian chemist) but not nearly enough for us. Although Feldman is no scientist himself, he did us a fine service, and I give him a small honorary Nobel, for investigative history. May there be more like him!