deservingporcupine 's review for:

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

2.0

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I think I would have been able to give this book 3 stars if it hadn't disappointed me so much. The title was highly misleading, as most of the "stories" were really very much about the elements and their atoms and not particularly about the people who were obsessed with understanding them. The book was organized so poorly that I honestly kept forgetting who had done what and why it mattered. Overall this book had a lot of breadth but almost no depth. I think the author missed a lot of opportunities to tell really fascinating stories about really fascinating things.