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 (PDF)

Description

From New York Times bestselling author Sam Kean comes incredible stories of science, history, finance, mythology, the arts, medicine, and more, as told by the Periodic Table. Why did Gandhi hate iodine (I, 53)? How did radium (Ra, 88) nearly ruin Marie Curie’s reputation? And why is gallium (Ga, 31) the go-to element for laboratory pranksters? The Periodic Table is a crowning scientific achievement, but it’s also a treasure trove of adventure, betrayal, and obsession. These fascinating tales follow every element on the table as they play out their parts in human history, and in the lives of the (frequently) mad scientists who discovered them. The Disappearing Spoon masterfully fuses science with the classic lore of invention, investigation, and discovery — from the Big Bang through the end of time. Though solid at room temperature, gallium is a moldable metal that melts at 84 degrees Fahrenheit. A classic science prank is to mold gallium spoons, serve them with tea, and watch guests recoil as their utensils disappear.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “Kean…unpacks the periodic table’s bag of tricks with such aplomb and fascination that material normally as heavy as lead transmutes into gold. A-“―Keith Staskiewicz, Entertainment Weekly”Kean’s writing sparks like small shocks…he gives science a whiz-bang verve so that every page becomes one you cannot wait to turn just to see what he’s going reveal next.”―Caroline Leavitt, The Boston Globe”[Kean turns] The Disappearing Spoon into a nonstop parade of lively science stories…ebullient.”―Janet Maslin, New York Times”Kean’s palpable enthusiasm and the thrill of knowledge and invention the book imparts can infect even the most right-brained reader.”―Christine Thomas, Miami Herald”With a constant flow of fun facts bubbling to the surface, Kean writes with wit, flair, and authority in a debut that will delight even general readers.”―Publishers Weekly”Nearly 150 years of wide-ranging science…and Kean makes it all interesting. Entertaining and enlightening.”―Kirkus”Only once in a rare while does an author come along with the craft and the vision to capture the fun and fascination of chemistry. The Disappearing Spoon is a pleasure and full of insights. If only I had read it before taking chemistry.”―Mark Kurlansky, author of Salt and Cod “If you stared a little helplessly at the chart of the periodic table on the wall of your high school chemistry class, then this is the book for you. It elucidates both the meanings and the pleasures of those numbers and letters, and does so with style and dash.”―Bill McKibben, author of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet”The Disappearing Spoon shines a welcome light on the beauty of the periodic table. Follow plain speaking and humorous Sam Kean into its intricate geography and stray into astronomy, biology, and history, learn of neon rain and gas warfare, meet both ruthless and selfless scientists, and before it is over fall head over heels for the anything but arcane subject of chemistry.”―Bill Streever, author of Cold Review 1. “It happens often in biology, but only once in a rare while does an author come along with the craft and the vision to capture the fun and fascination of chemistry. Sam Kean’s The Disappearing Spoon is a pleasure and full of insights. If only I had read it before taking chemistry.” –Mark Kurlanksy, author of Salt and Cod 2. “The best science writers…bring an enthusiasm for the material that infects those of us who wouldn’t usually give a flying proton. Sam Kean…unpacks the periodic table’s bag of tricks with such aplomb and fascination that material normally as heavy as lead transmutes into gold. With the anecdotal flourishes of Oliver Sacks and the populist accessibility of Malcolm Gladwell…Kean succeeds in giving us the cold hard facts, both human and chemical, behind the astounding phenomena without sacrificing any of the wonder–a trait vital to any science writer worth his NaCl. A-” –Entertainment Weekly 3. “Sam Kean…is brimming with puckish wit, and his love for the elements is downright infectious. Kean’s book is so rambunctious and so much fun, you’ll find yourself wanting to grab someone just to share tidbits. But the alchemy of this book is the way Kean makes you see and experience and appreciate the world differently, with a real sense of wonder and a joy of discovery, that is downright elemental.” –Caroline Leavitt, Boston Globe 4. “This is nonfiction to make you sound smart over gin and tonics: the human history behind the periodic table.” –Time.com 5. “Sam Kean…has done something remarkable: He’s made some highly technical science accessible, placed well-known and lesser-known discoveries in the contest of history and made reading about the lives of the men and women inside the lab coats enjoyable.” –Austin American-Statesman 6. “Fascinating. Kean has Bill Bryson’s comic touch when it comes to describing genius-lunatic scientists…The book is not so much a primer in chemistry as a lively history of the elements and the characters behind their discovery.” –New Scientist 7. “A quirky and refreshingly human look at a structure we usually think of as purely pragmatic.” –SeedMagazine.com 8. “[The Disappearing Spoon is] crammed full of compelling anecdotes about each of the elements, plenty of nerd-gossip involving Nobel prizes, and enough political intrigue to capture the interest of the anti-elemental among us. Once you’re done with this book, do your chemistry teacher and all her future students a favor, and send her a copy.” –Galleycat 9. “Kean loves a good story, and his account teems with ripping yarns, colorful characters, and the occasional tall tale of chemical invention….let us hope that Kean…continues to bring the excitement of science out of the lab and into the homes of the American reading public.” –Chemical & Engineering News 10. “An idiosyncratic romp through the history of science. The author is a great raconteur with plenty of stories to tell….entertaining and enlightening.” –Kirkus Reviews 11. “The Disappearing Spoon shines a welcome light on the beauty of the periodic table. Follow plain speaking and humorous Sam Kean into its intricate geography and stray into astronomy, biology, and history, learn of neon rain and gas warfare, meet both ruthless and selfless scientists, and before it is over fall head over heels for the anything but arcane subject of chemistry.” –Bill Streever, author of Cold 12. “If you stared a little helplessly at the chart of the periodic table on the wall of your high school chemistry class, then this is the book for you. It elucidates both the meanings and the pleasures of those numbers and letters, and does so with style and dash.” –Bill McKibben, author of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet About the Author Sam Kean is the New York Times bestselling author of Caesar’s Last Breath, The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons, The Disappearing Spoon, and The Violinist’s Thumb, all of which were also named Amazon top science books of the year. The Disappearing Spoon was a runner-up for the Royal Society of London’s book of the year for 2010, and The Violinist’s Thumb and The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons were nominated for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award in 2013 and 2015, as well as the AAAS/Subaru SB&F prize. His work has appeared in the Best American Nature and Science Writing, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the New York Times Magazine, Psychology Today, Slate, Mental Floss, and other publications, and he has been featured on NPR’s “Radiolab,” “All Things Considered,” and “Fresh Air.” Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐One of the prettiest books I have on my shelves right now is Theodore Gray’s The Elements, a visual collection of all the elements that make up the physical universe. “Everything you can drop on your foot,” as he says. In it, he provides wonderful pictures and descriptions of the elements that we know, arranged as they would be in the periodic table. It’s a gorgeous book, one that everyone should have – especially if you have children. If you want your kids to become interested in science and investigating the world around them, you could do far worse than to have this book on your shelves.Eventually, though, they’ll be old enough and canny enough to ask, “Well, how do we know all this? Where did we find these things, and how? And why are they in this order?” That’s the point where you hand them The Disappearing Spoon, sit back, and let Sam Kean take over.The story of the elements, and our understanding of them, is governed just as much by personality as by p-shells, as much by competition as by charge, as much by ego as by electrons. While the elements themselves don’t pay any attention to human affairs, the quest to understand the building blocks of matter have sent us to the hearts of stars, the depths of the earth and, for various reasons, Ytterby, Sweden. [1]Kean starts with how he got into the elements, with a story that would horrify modern-day parents: mercury. When he was a kid, his mother would collect the mercury from broken thermometers and keep it in a little bottle on a high shelf. If they were lucky, she would let her children play with it for a while, swirling it around and watching while this shiny liquid metal split apart and fused back together perfectly, never leaving a bit of itself behind. It was a metal that flowed like water, and it was fascinating. If he had known at that age that ancient alchemists thought there were spirits living in mercury, he would not have been surprised.Keeping an eye out for mercury, he learned that modern scientists are able to follow the expedition of Lewis and Clark using mercury. The explorers carried with them a good quantity of Dr. Benjamin Rush’s Bilious Pills, a “cure” for any illness that mainly contained mercury chloride. It was vile stuff, poisoning everyone who took it, but without an FDA around to stop this kind of nonsense, Rush made plenty of money. It probably didn’t hurt his credibility that he was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. In any case, he gave samples to the Lewis and Clark expedition, and their latrine sites can still be found today by the unusually high levels of mercury that were deposited there as the men’s bodies tried to get rid of the heavy metal as quickly as possible.Mercury also taught Kean about mythology – the Roman god of communication, modeled on the Greek message-bearer. It taught him etymology – the chemical symbol for mercury is Hg, which is derived from the Latin hydragyrum, which means “silver water.” It informed him on literature, especially the Mad Hatter of Alice in Wonderland, who was based on the poor crazies who used to breathe in the fumes of mercury while setting felt for their hats.This one weird, eerie element was a door into so many other topics that he figured there must be others. And so he started work on this book, a collection of histories and tales, gossip and hearsay, all centered around the 118 physical elements that make up our universe. “As we know,” he writes, “90 percent of particles in the universe are hydrogen, and the other 10 percent are helium. Everything else, including six million billion billion kilos of earth, is a cosmic rounding error.” Within that rounding error, though, some amazing things have been found.In the 19th century, the Russian Dimitri Mendeleev examined the common properties of different elements and was able to sort the elements in such a way that took advantage of their similarities. The violent alkalies along the far left, which will explode if given half a chance, and their cousins, the halogens on the far right, some of the most reactive elements in nature. Separating them are the noble gasses, which don’t react with anything unless pushed to extremes. Without knowing about electron shells and the weird quantum things that happen on the atomic level, Mendeleev managed to put together a table so good that he was able to leave gaps in it that corresponded to elements that hadn’t yet been found. And by telling the world that these gaps existed, the race to isolate and discover the elements was on.Kean’s book is a great look at the way science works on a human level. How the search for high-quality porcelain led to the discovery of an entire class of elements, how Marie Curie would get into trouble by dragging her (male) colleagues into dark closets to show them how radium glowed, how nitrogen kills with kindness and lithium quiets an unsettled mind. The competition to not only find these elements but to name them and find uses for them has driven science forward in all fields, from geology to neurology, for the last two hundred years. Those 118 squares on the periodic table have driven men to travel the world, to create economic and political empires, to love, to hate, and to murder.If this kind of thing were taught in high school chemistry class, there would probably be a lot more kids interested in science as a career.The book is very readable, even if it does drift from time to time into more technical areas. One of my colleagues, who doesn’t have an extensive background in science, said she was a little slowed down by talk of electron shells and quantum jumps, which I guess were not aided by Kean’s elevator similes. But it did get her asking the right questions – how do we know atoms exist if we can’t see them? How can we be sure that what is in this book is true?Those are the questions that Kean tries to answer in the book, but it’s also the kind of book that may bring up more questions. It’s “gateway science,” one of those books that pulls away the cold, rational veneer of the scientist and his or her endeavors, and shows what an exciting, weird, messy and dramatic place science can be. What’s more, it shows how science is deeply ingrained not only into our technology, but our language, history and politics. An understanding of science, even at an amateur level, is a wonderful way to open your eyes to the great, complex and bizarre world in which we live.———————————————————–“We eat and breathe the periodic table; people bet and lose huge sums on it; philosophers use it to probe the meaning of science; it poisons people; it spawns wars. Between hydrogen at the top left and the man-made impossibilities lurking along the bottom, you can find bubbles, bombs, money, alchemy, petty politics, history, poison, crime, and love. Even some science.”- Sam Kean, The Disappearing Spoon————————————————————[1] The town has the distinct honor of having four elements named after it: yttrium (Y), ytterbium (Yb), terbium (Tb), and erbium (Er). What has your hometown got?

⭐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”The Disappearing Spoon” is the absorbing history of the periodic table through the eyes of each chemical element. As the author so eloquently states himself, “The periodic table, is finally, an anthropological marvel, a human artifact that reflects all of the wonderful and artful and ugly aspects of human beings and how we interact with the physical world, the history of our species written in a compact and elegant script”. This is science-writer Sam Kean’s first book and it’s a bestseller; a fantastic science book about the seldom written topic of chemistry. This 416-page book is broken out into the following five parts: Part I. Orientation: Column by Column, Row by Row, Part II. Making Atoms, Breaking Atoms, Part III. Periodic Confusion: The Emergence of Complexity, Part IV. The Elements of Human Character, and Part V. Element Science Today and Tomorrow.Positives:1. Great science writing, that educates the public through history and clever anecdotes.2. Turns lead into gold, that is turns a typically dull topic like chemistry into fascinating history. Bravo!3. Well researched book. This was an ambitious project and Kean succeeds.4. What a fun way to learn about science.5. Diverse stories behind every element. Some stories are scary, others hilarious, and some even strange but never dull.6. Good use of basic chemistry to kick the book off. Carbon’s “promiscuity”.7. The scientists behind the elements. The stories, the history, and what lead them to their discovery. Name-dropping at its the best, the greats in science.8. Very happy to see many of the female scientists get their due and the unique challenges they faced.9. Ultimately a better appreciation for the periodic table. I will never look at it the same way ever again.10. Mendeleev the father of the periodic table. The logic used and why his version succeeded where others failed.11. Great use of other science fields and how they converge to each element. Astronomy, physics, biology, quantum mechanics, paleontology…12. What would life be without irony? Some of the stories behind the elements are truly mesmerizing. Wars, health, money…13. The impact of UC Berkeley…a recurring theme.14. Scientific mistakes that lead to great findings.15. The most dangerous, the most stable, the most “promiscuous”, the most odd, the most useful, the most blank elements are all here.16. The creation of medical drugs. The chances, risks…17. The names behind the elements.18. Money and chemistry.19. Great industrial applications. Pens, X-Rays, Aluminum…20. Using elements to establish standards.21. The present and future of the periodic table.22. Great links to notes, bibliography.23. Great reference book.Negatives:1. The book is overall accessible but the few technical aspects of chemistry does exceed the layperson.2. The book could have used more charts and illustrations to assist the reader.3. The technical part of the book was weak. I thought the author could have spend more time even as an appendix to provide a better understanding on bonding and how molecules form. In other words, use the appendix as a technical supplement in order to keep the narrative clean.In summary, I really enjoyed this and very satisfied to have selected this book as my chemistry choice. I’ve read a number of books on evolution, physics, astronomy, neuroscience, general science but very few about strictly chemistry. So what better book to read about chemistry than one about the history of the Periodic Table and its elements. What sets this book apart from your standard issue science book is the story-telling ability from young author Sam Kean and the interesting history behind the evolution of the Periodic Table. Each element has a story to tell and Kean provides us the most interesting tidbits and in doing so not only gives life to what usually is a dull topic but enlightens and educates the public as well. I highly recommend it!Further suggestions: ”

⭐” by Robert M. Hazen, ”

⭐” by Walter Lewin, ”

⭐” by Michio Kaku, ”

⭐” Brian Clegg, ”

⭐” by Sherry Seethaler, ”

⭐” by Stephen Hawking, ”

⭐” by Bill Bryson, ”

⭐” by Lawrence M. Krauss, ”

⭐” by Mathew Hedman, ”

⭐” by Jerry A. Coyne and “The Quantum Universe (And Why Anything That Can Happen, Does)” by Bryan Cox.

⭐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).

⭐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

⭐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 .

⭐I’m a chemist and I’m always looking for some scientific books, so when I came upon this one I decided to give it a go. As soon as I started it I got extremely hooked and couldn’t stop reading it!It has got a vast amount of curious and scientifically interesting facts and gives a profound insight into the lives of many scientists, not only talking about their main discoveries, but also describing their social interactions and their growing up in a sort of story-telling way that makes each page so interesting!You will be able to learn about the discovery of the elements and will also learn so many fun facts about them! Did you know that berillium has a sweet taste that resembles that of sugar?The book also goes into such diverse topics as nuclear physics and toxicology, always linking an element to an event in history!So, if you’re looking for a really interesting scientific book, then do buy this one!

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