Review : Nylon and cyanide

Wallace Carothers, the inventor of nylon and subject of Enough for One
Lifetime by Matthew Hermes (American Chemical Society, £33/$38.95,
ISBN 0 8412 3331 4) followed his striking success at Du Pont by disappearing
from the scene. A few years later he committed suicide by swallowing cyanide.
Hermes, himself a chemist, deeply sympathises with Carothers’s personal and
professional struggles. He does justice to a strange career that began in the
Paris of Hemingway, the Fitzgeralds and Gertrude Stein. Chemistry well within
reach.