Brave Genius: A Scientist, a Philosopher, and Their Daring Adventures from the French Resistance to the Nobel Prize

Nominally a work about two Nobel laureates—biologist Jacques Monod and writer/philosopher Albert Camus—and their eventual friendship, Carroll’s latest (after the National Book Award–nominated Remarkable Creatures) sprawls across a vast field, spiraling dangerously near incoherence. The friendship between the two men, warm and satisfying as it was, seems merely an excuse for the book. Still, Carroll has a winning way with words, and everything he writes about (especially difficult matters of science) sparkles with clarity. But coverage of WWII-era Europe, as well as the French Resistance (in which both Monod and Camus were active, without yet knowing each other), discussions of genetics and Existentialism, and analyses of the horrific conflict in Algeria in the ’50s and ’60s and the 1968 Paris student uprisings don’t gel into a book—especially not one that is said to be about two men whose lives happened to intertwine. Carroll is convincing about Camus’s influence on Monod’s nontechnical thinking and writing, but the book has no center. The result is a diverting, informative work, but not a satisfying one. Agent: Russell Galen, Scovil Galen Ghosh Literary Agency. (Sept.)