A review by peter_fischer
The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements by Sam Kean

3.0

This is a very entertaining and yet profound book not only about the physics and chemistry of the periodic table, but at the same time about the people who helped construct it. Although I am a chemist, many of the anecdotes about famous scientist were new to me, including Linus Pauling getting the structure of DNA so totally wrong, or Gilbert Lewis (he of the Lewis acids and bases) never having won a Nobel prize, despite having made some of the most fundamental discoveries in physical chemistry. I have only one complaint: the author’s style, especially when being humorous, tends to become home-spun American and difficult to understand for non-Americans like myself. You would have thought that his publishing editors might have pointed this out.