The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements 1st Edition, Kindle Edition

This book contains the linguistic key to deciphering all the unoduodenum elements at the end of the periodic table, and a fascinating account of the world's adventures, and misadventures, involving the periodic table, from the age of the "gentleman scientist" to modern-era spats between physicists trying to name the latest periodic smashburger.I recommend this book as much as I recommend a heat gun for removing gallium from all your stuff.

Recommended. I enjoy reading about the history of science. The origin of important inventions and discoveries is another way of looking at human stories, showing the personal lives of scientists with ordinary human ambitions, and how the rules of nature underlie seemingly unrelated conflicts.For example, element 42 (molybdenum) has a very high melting point, and led to some cloak-and-dagger operations in World War I because the Germans were desperate to get the stuff for use in the famous "Big Bertha" cannons. That hints at a whole aspect of warfare that's rarely discussed, the procurement of special materials. (Another good case of that is the US acquisition of one unique, freakishly rich deposit of uranium ore from the Congo in WWII.)The author tries to make the science he's talking about accessible, but it would help if you've taken at least enough high school chemistry to have some idea what orbitals are, and know what the Bohr Model is and the fact that it's not quite true. I have an undergrad level chem knowledge and was nodding my head impatiently at some parts of this I already knew, but I still learned some things about chemistry itself from this book. Such as the reason why the "rare earth elements" are basically described as "dunno, grey metal I guess" and hard to separate. And these REEs are very important to modern tech and to US/China trade disputes and warfare. So, even the purely technical details here have relevance to non-obvious, real topics outside of the science world.

Chemistry 101 was the most boring class I had in college. Even a very interesting professor could not make it anything more than dull memorization. The other sciences had reasons for why things were as they were. Chemistry, as taught, was simply lists of things that went together or didn’t go together, had specific properties or didn’t and occasionally did something exciting, like exploding when handled improperly.Kean’s fascination with the elements began with the shiny silver beads formed when he dropped the thermometers used to take his temperature during frequent childhood bouts of strep throat. “From that one element, I learned history, etymology, alchemy, mythology, literature, poison forensics, and psychology. “ As what seemed a sideline to scientific studies in college, he collected tales about the elements and “realized that there’s a funny, or odd, or chilling tale attached to every element on the periodic table. At the same time, the table is one of the great intellectual achievements of humankind. It’s both a scientific accomplishment and a storybook.”In his telling, the scientists and occasional con artists come alive. And the elements themselves step forward as characters. Who can resist an explanation of the carbon basis of life that contains the statement, “That promiscuity is carbon’s virtue”? Or an aside such as, “(When pitcher plants and Venus flytraps trap insects, it’s the bugs’ nitrogen they’re after.)” There are references to “poisoners’ corridor”, “malfunctioning molecules “and ”one oared rowboats”. One of the clearest explanations of the basic concept of electron shells is a bus metaphor.True science that avoids the pop fiction version and makes the real thing fascinating reading.

Sam Kean’s The Disappearing Spoon, tells the story of the periodic table from how it began to the newest found elements today. Each chapter is characterized as a theme; money, war, politics, medicine and others. Each theme is assigned by groups of elements in the periodic table. The book explains how certain elements were found and how they relate to each other. The book also explains, in depth, about the incredible and genius people who have discovered each element. One of the people that the book talks about is Gilbert Lewis who discovered the covalent bond and the concept of electron pairs (Lewis dot structures). He was described as a very competitive and determined person though, his main goal was to receive a Nobel Prize but he unfortunately died from a heart attack before reaching his goal. His lab smelled like cyanide gas the afternoon he died and he also smoked about twenty cigars per day for over forty years so there was a controversy about what caused his death. Many other interesting facts can be learned about different elements and scientists by reading this book; the longest word in the English language (1,185 letters) is a protein of the tobacco virus, pentafluoride mixed with hydrofluoric acid yields an acid that is 100,00 billion, billion, billion, times stronger than stomach acid and is probably what caused Mozart to have a severe fever and die. The stories about each element is organized in a way in which one element smoothly leads to the other which allows the reader to become intrigued in the book.It was difficult to try and find the perfect score for this book because it really depends on the type of reader. I decided to read this book because I thought it would give a fun and interesting twist on the information of the periodic table but it was written more as a textbook with some interesting facts put in between. This is why I would score the book a 6/10. I was very interested during some parts of the book, for example when it explains how Thallium is considered to be the deadliest element or that an explosion causing a man to become half blind is what created the bunsen burner. Though, especially in the beginning of the book, there were many parts that left me feeling very bored and uninterested. When first looking at the book and its overview, I thought that its focus would be more on the unknown and unusual stories of the elements and their founders but after reading the book, I believe that it had a different focus. I believe that it’s main focus was on the elements’ chemical properties, like placement on the periodic table and how they interact with other substances, and the interesting stories or facts were only written about some elements. This is why the interest that one would have for this book depends on the type of reader. Personally, I prefer more fictional and story-telling books and this book did have multiple very interesting stories, but also included a big focus on the chemistry of each element. Overall, the book is written in a way in which readers who have an understanding of chemistry will understand all aspects of the book, and readers who have very little chemistry knowledge will become interested in this book because it is filled with stories from a big range of areas in history from arts to biology.

The science history is interesting but this book is spoiled by the author not knowing the meaning of English words and using them inappropriately.On most pages there's an instance where he's used one word but means another. E.g., he writes of the "bridges between our physical bodies and our incorporate minds." That one's easy, he means incorporeal. Incorporate isn't even an adjective; it's a verb. In something like, "Mendeleev's craw knew of a particularly intractable exception in the [periodic] table." Here he just doesn't know what craw means, and you can kinda tell what he means but the metaphor is clumsy. "The further you burrow down and parse electrons [...], the fuzzier they seem." By parse it looks like he means 'experimentally investigate the behaviours of'. It's like he wanted to jzeush up his prose by picking one word in each second paragraph and replacing it with a random thesaurus lookup. It's so painful to read! I'm going to persevere because I like the science he's writing about but this lousy editing is jarring. I'm finding something like this on every second page of my Kindle.The publisher is Penguin Random House so they should know better than to publish a book that hasn't been edited or edited so carelessly. This book is turning me into a curmudgeon! Grrrr.

Interesting and entertaining, as long as you don’t take it too seriously. As other reviewers have commented there are a number of errors and grammatical gaffs. It seems to be primarily written for a US audience with a particular US bias and use of non-SI units such as pounds and ounces for weight, or Fahrenheit for temperature. For a book on science, this seems very out of place and almost shocking.Lumping all the footnotes together at the end of the book effectively means they won’t be read, depriving the reader of what could have been interesting additional comment. At least the author uses the correct spelling of Aluminium (and goes on to explain why the US spells it differently).

Very good hidden history and chemistry stories . This will add to your general knowledge, especially on how far the Germans were ahead of the Allies in both wars with Fritz and Tungsten missiles. I liked Sam's point that Portugal acted as a middle man in laundering Jewish gold and trading materials . Curiously, Churchill turned a blind eye .

Could have been a reasonable book but it just progressed to be a case for why America is the purest of wonderful. It's reference points are narrow and fed very largely by America's contributions to science and then frustratingly in a book about science it ends up with random anti-Russian rhetoric ('only 2 useless elements were discovered in Russia,' 'the list of great Russian scientists is barren'), has a remakrable statement about America being the only 'scientifically developed country' with enough scruples not to sign the Hague Convention to ban chemical warfare on the basis that all signators were hypocritical and then progresses to celebrate America's triumph in the greatest scientific project of all time, the Manhatten Project.Frustrating tosh, utlimately narrow in scope and nothing like as disconnected and researched as it could have been

Easily read and quite simply put (even for duffers). The Periodic Table is the fascinating cornerstone of all things intrinsic, and everyone ought to have at least some knowledge of what makes our world. The author explains in a unique way, and makes the complex accessible.A great read.