The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements

I am an engineer, and have spent a good chunk of my life dealing with parts of the periodic table. I bought this book on an impulse, and I am glad I did. It was a very enjoyable experience reading it, and I was sorry when it came to an end.=== The Good Stuff ===* Sam Kean does a great job in mixing a litte science, a touch of history, some genuine supposition and a dash of humor. The result is a view of the periodic table, its history, and a number of stories about some of its residents. He writes in a fun, easy to read style, and doesn't include a lot of technical jargon or fifteen letter words.* Kean is mostly careful about what is proven knowledge versus what is informed supposition, although he occasionally gets careless with what is fact versus hearsay. Still, most of the "how this was discovered" stories are more for entertainment value, this is a perfectly acceptable standard.* While this is in no way a chemistry or physics book, to understand the beauty, logic, and difficulty in constructing the periodic table, you need to know some details about the structure of an atom. Kean strikes a nice balance. The text is technical enough to highlight what makes the periodic table so clever and useful, but yet perfectly understandable by anyone with even the slightest hint of how an atom is constructed.* Kean has a gift of tying history, myth, science and intelligent guesswork together. As an example, he relates a tale of an area of Asia Minor, where copper, zinc and tin ores exist, often mingled together. Copper and tin, mixed together make bronze, a dull, yellowy metal. But copper and zinc mixed together make brass, a very shiny golden metal, which can plausibly be mistaken for gold by ancient alchemists. And Asia Minor is noted for having some very early bronze foundries, and coincidentally, the legendary home of King Midas. Kean can't prove that some ancient process for replacing the tin in bronze with zinc, and thereby making brass, was mistaken for alchemy, but it is an interesting bit of supposition..Kean also relates a marvelous story about John Bardeen, who won the Nobel prize for the transistor in the 1950's. At the award ceremony, the King of Sweden asked why he hadn't brought his sons along to the ceremony. "Next time" quipped Bardeen. In 1972, when he was awarded a 2nd Nobel Prize for superconductivity, Bardeen introduced his adult sons to the King.=== The Not-So-Good Stuff===* Kean writes with a sarcastic wit, something that I enjoy but which some readers might find objectionable.* Some of the tales that Kean relates, for instance the story of Lise Meitner, are rather complicated and involve a fairly obtuse plot and cast of characters. Her discovery of fission, and the lack of credit she received for it are more appropriate for a 300 page work rather than a page or two. A brief overview poses more questions than it answers.=== Summary ===* A very enjoyable book. Its obvious appeal is to anyone who is more than a casual user of the periodic table. However, there are enough stories and anecdotes in the book that even non-techies will probably enjoy it. I'd recommend it to anyone who has ever stared at the familiar chart in any classroom and wondered what it means.

This is a well-written, hard to put down book that surveys science and society from the perspective of the periodic table of the elements. It's a skillful job, skillfully done.Each chapter focuses on several elements, usually something about their chemical properties or their discovery. The elements are tied together elegantly at the end of the chapter, often by some deep historical thread.This sounds perhaps much less interesting than it turns out in fact to be. The author does a brilliant job of simplifying the science but still teaching a lot and of making the stories and the people come alive. The book is interesting and fun to read and, as others have said, is one I wish I'd had in chemistry class.I had only a couple of problems with the book, none of which, to be fair, likely to bother the vast majority of readers.First, there are many unsourced claims. Because of the provocative nature of some of the stories told in the book, I would have preferred to have had more primary sources cited. For example the incredible story of Otis King and the mining of molybdenum is unsourced.I certainly do not want to impugn the author's credibility here. He comes across as candid and careful in his research (although he does incorrectly claim on page 109 that "computer" was a "neologism" applied to the women performing calculations for the Manhattan project, when in fact the term had been used since the 17th century to mean a person who does calculations, but this is minor.) Still, more footnotes would have been nice. The author does have a section of very interesting notes.Second, the author's politics, although mainstream, occasionally intrude on the narrative.Third, the author unnecessarily and distractingly uses crude or profane language several times. Surely there is no shortage of places where fans of profanity can read or hear it to their hearts' content. Can't they at least read a single book without getting their fix? It's bad enough the language is unavoidable in fiction, movies and the popular media - now it's infecting scholarly books!Anyway, there are so many interesting stories in the book, any one of which could be a book or movie in its own right, that it's hard to know where to start to summarize them. I'll choose three that stuck out in mind.(1) I found the story of Otis Archie King, who owned a molybdenum mine in Colorado in the early 20th century, fascinating. According to the author, molybdenum was greatly desired - even required - for hardening the steel in siege guns during World War 1. An American subsidiary of a German company forced King to sell his mine to them, partly by violence, but also by that most American of methods: tying up King's company in court with baseless lawsuits!(2) a story tinged with tragedy was that of Lise Meitner, who was denied the Nobel prize in favor of her male colleague, Otto Hahn. Much of the discussion of the refugee scientists of World War 2 is of a very high caliber, by the way, particularly an amazing story involving Hevesy and Bohr concealing the gold from Nobel Prize medals (p. 214).(3) my last example is the story of Robert Falcon Scott's doomed expedition to the South Pole. The author suggests that there is evidence that it was the molecular structure of tin, and its reaction to extreme cold that caused its failure when the expedition's tin canteens may have broken down in the cold.In conclusion, I recommend this book to just about anyone with any interest in science or its history.