The Disappearing Spoon

Page for page, it’s been a long time since I’ve learned as much about such a wide variety of topics as I did from Sam Kean’s The Disappearing Spoon, and this book is long. It is presented as a book centered on the Periodic Table:

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.

This book touches upon how chemistry plays into nearly every subject of human learning. While it starts off a bit slow, with the first two chapters dealing with refreshing some basic review of atoms and electric charge, the Periodic Table and how it’s organized, and the people behind it, but quickly gets into material both more human and philosophical.

The book hits its stride at Chapter 4 (Where atoms come from: “We are all star stuff”) and keeps it up through its conclusion with Chapter 19 (Above (and beyond) the periodic table), touching on a huge breadth of topics along the way: how elements are used to heal or harm; the relationship between chemistry, biology, and physics; how our bodies’ protection systems can be fooled; money, art, scams, bubbles, measurement standards, and the borders of our knowledge of the universe.

Kean is a talented narrator and these topics are approached through story, a medium I feel is very conducive to building interest and encouraging curiosity as opposed to lecture. He weaves these tales through histories both ancient and recent, and touch upon the people involved as much as the consequences of the topics of the elements under discussion.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book; every night had something I learned from it that I thought worthy of discussion at family dinner. I learned about the book because my elementary-aged child recommended the young readers edition, which in addition to being much shorter, elides the more gruesome topics.