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A review by katieinca
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
Halfway through this book I was pretty sure this was going to be a one star review summed up with "Save yourself the trouble and go Google gallium spoons."
The author has written for Mental Floss and too much of this feels like an extended Mental Floss piece. I think every Mental Floss article I've read has had at least one glaring factual error, so anytime I read anything that seemed cool here I felt like I needed a chemist friend to read the chapter over for me and verify its accuracy. The early chapters also felt like they'd been run through a vocabulary and syntax checker to make sure it was accessible to an eighth grade reading level, and I prefer my popular science at about 12th. There are certain narrative tics - extreme oversimplification, describing long dead people as though one knew them personally, drawing super flimsy connections for the sake of forcing a narrative thread - that really grate.
Wow, it's really coming back to me how annoying I found parts of this book. But either I got used to the tics or the book got better. It certainly got more challenging, while the characterizations of the scientists got less folksy and more grounded in attribution. In any case, by the end I didn't find it so painful, I started to lose track of the number of things I wanted to tell people to go Google from it (Bismuth crystals! Parker 51 pens!), and I appreciated his addressing the role of gender and national prejudice as barriers to success in science.
Still. If I had it to do over again I don't think I'd recommend it to my month-ago self as worth the time.
The author has written for Mental Floss and too much of this feels like an extended Mental Floss piece. I think every Mental Floss article I've read has had at least one glaring factual error, so anytime I read anything that seemed cool here I felt like I needed a chemist friend to read the chapter over for me and verify its accuracy. The early chapters also felt like they'd been run through a vocabulary and syntax checker to make sure it was accessible to an eighth grade reading level, and I prefer my popular science at about 12th. There are certain narrative tics - extreme oversimplification, describing long dead people as though one knew them personally, drawing super flimsy connections for the sake of forcing a narrative thread - that really grate.
Wow, it's really coming back to me how annoying I found parts of this book. But either I got used to the tics or the book got better. It certainly got more challenging, while the characterizations of the scientists got less folksy and more grounded in attribution. In any case, by the end I didn't find it so painful, I started to lose track of the number of things I wanted to tell people to go Google from it (Bismuth crystals! Parker 51 pens!), and I appreciated his addressing the role of gender and national prejudice as barriers to success in science.
Still. If I had it to do over again I don't think I'd recommend it to my month-ago self as worth the time.