Sean Carroll’s never-before-told account of the intersection of two of the most insightful minds of the twentieth century, Nobel Prize winners Albert Camus and Jacques Monod is a dramatic story of how war, resistance, and courage can catalyze genius.
Sean Carroll’s never-before-told account of the intersection of two of the most insightful minds of the twentieth century, Nobel Prize winners Albert Camus and Jacques Monod is a dramatic story of how war, resistance, and courage can catalyze genius.
Drawing upon a wealth of previously unpublished and unknown material gathered over several years of research, BRAVE GENIUS tells the story of how each man endured the most terrible episode of the twentieth century and then blossomed into extraordinarily creative and engaged individuals. It is a story of the transformation of ordinary lives into exceptional lives by extraordinary events–of courage in the face of overwhelming adversity, the flowering of creative genius, deep friendship, and of profound concern for and insight into the human condition.
I knew a little about Camus but thanks to Carroll I have a much fuller and richer perspective on his mind and heart. The early embrace of Communisim and unlike his friend Sartre, rejection after fully grasping Stalin’s murderous reign and its implications. Their falling out sent shock waves through literary and philosophical Paris dividing the city into Sartrists and Camusians.
As one of 1.2 million Pieds-Noirs (French citizens of Algeria) the battle of Algeria tore Camus between his leftist, liberal instincts for the native population and his pride in belonging to country within a country that dated from 1830.
The genesis of The Plague and The Stranger are explored in meticulous but always accessible detail and encourage me to learn more about a man who tragically died in an auto crash just as he was at the height of his craft.
Jacques Monod, on the other hand was completely unknown to me, although having won his Nobel Prize for his research into DNA and the secrets of life. Carroll, himself a scientist and professor of molecular biology and genetics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, does a masterful job of reducing this research into layman’s terms.
He and Camus crossed paths in their clandestine and active roles in the French Resistance to the Nazi occupation.
Monod’s efforts on behalf of freedom didn’t stop with victory over Hitler but continued most emphatically with his efforts to get fellow scientist Agnes Ullman and her husband out of Hungary in 1956. Carroll’s account reads like an espionage thriller wit the handsome and charismatic Monod completely destroying the myth of the mild-mannered scientist.
“A tour de force, a gripping narrative of a pivotal time in the history of Europe and of science. Finishing Brave Genius, I felt inspired by the determination of the key characters in the book, by their quest for liberty in the face of great injustice, and by the power their discoveries gave to understanding the living world.”
—Neil Shubin, author of Your Inner Fish and The Universe Within