Hager’s The Alchemy of Air (Broadway, 2009) is a gripping read. You might think a story about chemistry and chemical engineering — fixed nitrogen, hydrogen, and ammonia — would be a snooze, but you might be wrong.
Subtitle: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery that Fed the World and Fueled the Rise of Hitler. The book has something for everyone and lives up to its hyperbolic subtitle.
The Jew is Fritz Haber, who converted and became more German than the most stereotypical militaristic and nationalistic German. But he was also a Nobel-Prize-winning-stature scientist. The Tycoon is Carl Bosch, another Nobel Prize winner, whose inventive brilliance in engineering was indispensable. Also key is Heinrich von Brunck, head of BASF, who funded and fought the corporate board battles that made the needed immense financial resources available.
So if you want a real-life story with amazing science, more amazing engineering, and even more amazinger entrepreneurship (sometimes superlatives call for alternative grammars) — with patent battles, naval bombardments, labor-management battles that become massacres, and World War I chemical weapons, then this book is for you.
(Thanks to Dale Haling, who first recommended the book to me.)