Full name: A World on Fire: A Heretic, an Aristocrat, and the Race to Discover Oxygen

Author: Joe Jackson Year: 2005 Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: History, Science, Non Fiction Purchase/reserch links: LibraryThing Goodreads Amazon ISBNs: 9780143038832 0143038834

Like Charles Seife's Zero and Dava Sobel's Longitude, this passionate intellectual history is the story of the intersection of science and the human, in this case the rivals who discovered oxygen in the late 1700s. That breakthrough changed the world as radically as those of Newton and Darwin but was at first eclipsed by revolution and reaction. In chronicling the triumph and ruin of the English freethinker Joseph Priestley and the French nobleman Antoine Lavoisier--the former exiled, the latter executed on the guillotine--A World on Fire illustrates the perilous place of science in an age of unreason. Similar books: The Invention of Science by David Wootton The Invention of Air by Steven Johnson Copernicus' Secret by Jack Repcheck Napoleon's Buttons by Penny Le Couteur The Fellowship by John Gribbin The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes Ingenious Pursuits by Lisa Jardine The Scientists by John Gribbin Science by John Gribbin The Lunar Men by Jenny Uglow The Clockwork Universe by Edward Dolnick The Alchemy of Air by Thomas Hager The 13th Element by John Emsley Big Science by Michael Hiltzik To Explain the World by Steven Weinberg The Code Book by Simon Singh The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee A Man on the Moon by Andrew Chaikin The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert