THE DISAPPEARING SPOON by Sam Kean
The Periodic Table is one of man's crowning scientific achievements. But it's also a treasure trove of stories of passion, adventure, betrayal, and obsession. The infectious tales and astounding details in THE DISAPPEARING SPOON follow carbon, neon, silicon, and gold as they play out their parts in human history, finance, mythology, war, the arts, poison, and the lives of the (frequently) mad scientists who discovered them. We learn that Marie Curie used to provoke jealousy in colleagues' wives when she'd invite them into closets to see her glow-in-the-dark experiments. And that Lewis and Clark swallowed mercury capsules across the country and their campsites are still detectable by the poison in the ground. Why did Gandhi hate iodine? Why did the Japanese kill Godzilla with missiles made of cadmium? And why did tellurium lead to the most bizarre gold rush in history? From the Big Bang to the end of time, it's all in THE DISAPPEARING SPOON. The Barnes & Noble Review Kean's book has the structure of a Christmas tree. The trunk is a history of the classification of the elements, an effort that begins in the nineteenth century About The Author: Sam Kean is a writer in Washington, D.C. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Mental Floss, Slate, The Believer, Air & Space, Science, and The New Scientist. He is currently working as a reporter at Science magazine and as a 2009 Middlebury Environmental Journalism fellow. Special Features: The Disappearing Spoon The Barnes & Noble Review When I was a child, my dentist once gave me a small sample of mercury to take home in a tiny jar. (It helps when your dentist is also your cousin.) I loved the heaviness of mercury, its slipperiness, its way of breaking up into globules that would then merge back into a large droplet. I loved that mercury was a liquid metal - how cool is that? - and years later when I saw Terminator 2, with its villain whose body would re-form when splashed apart, I thought less about d
Categories: Science Fiction
