Alfred Nobel: A Biography

From Publishers Weekly
Swedish industrialist and chemist Alfred Nobel (1833-1896), the inventor of dynamite and founder of the prestigious prizes, is seen as a secluded misanthrope prone to melancholy and convinced of life's absurdities in this gracefully written biography by Swedish actor/director Fant. Of special interest here are excerpts from the committed bachelor's unpublished letters to his Austrian mistress, a coquettish flower sales clerk named Sofie Hess. Having met her when he was 43 and she 20, Nobel vacillates in the course of their 18-year correspondence between fatherly tenderness, sexual desire and patronizing attempts to remake Sofie into a cultured sophisticate. His lonely life was punctuated by tragedies. His brother Emil, a lab worker, died in an explosion and his unscrupulous French business partner, Paul Barbe, killed himself. But perhaps the greatest tragedy was that this shy pacifistic introvert believed that the creation of weapons of mass annihilation would make wars impossible forever.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
The inventor of dynamite and smokeless explosives wasn't consistently ambivalent about where technical progress was heading. It made him a fortune--as his brothers made one in establishing the Russian oil industry. Nobel had incentive to strive for wealth: his father attained some affluence by selling naval mines to the tsar's court, but then bankruptcy threw the family into poverty. Young Alfred kept to his father's line of work, and after several explosions, one costing the life of a brother, he had the formula for stabilizing nitroglycerine. This author, a Swedish dramaturge, rather prosaically records these details; his enthusiasm lies with Nobel's misanthropic psychology. Fant stresses two writings the Nobel foundation suppressed after their founder's death: a play Nobel wrote titled Nemesis, and his correspondence with his mistress. The resulting effect, teased from the play and pages of verbatim passages from the letters, certainly shades Nobel's gloominess and how his unease at his inventions awakened his pacifism. This biography is currently the only one in print; despite the flatness of Fant's prose, there should be general library interest. Gilbert Taylor
Product Description
A biography of the inventor of dynamite and the founder of the Nobel Prize uses Nobel's unpublished letters to offer a compelling account of this introverted, sickly, moody, yet ultimately humane man.