A Life of Magic Chemistry by George Olah, Wiley-Interscience, $34.95,
ISBN 0471157430
GEORGE OLAH’s life story, which he tells in A Life of Magic
Chemistry, takes him from a wartime in hiding, via human computers to
California and the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Born in Budapest in 1927, he was
old enough to see Toscanini rehearsing at the opera house: “a gentle, smallish
man who became, however, a holy terror with the orchestra and singers alike once
he raised his baton”. Having survived the horrors of Nazi Hungary in hiding, he
completed his education under communism.
He encountered the leading…
