Full name: The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements

Author: Sam Kean Year: 2010 Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: Science, Non Fiction, History Purchase/reserch links: Goodreads Amazon eBooks.com LibraryThing ISBNs: 9780316051644 9780316051637 0316051640 0316051632

The Periodic Table is one of man's crowning scientific achievements. But it's also a treasure trove of stories of passion, adventure, betrayal, and obsession. The infectious tales and astounding details in "The Disappearing Spoon" follow carbon, neon, silicon, and gold as they play out their parts in human history, finance, mythology, war, the arts, poison, and the lives of the (frequently) mad scientists who discovered them. We learn that Marie Curie used to provoke jealousy in colleagues' wives when she'd invite them into closets to see her glow-in-the-dark experiments. And that Lewis and Clark swallowed mercury capsules across the country and their campsites are still detectable by the poison in the ground. Why did Gandhi hate iodine? Why did the Japanese kill Godzilla with missiles made of cadmium? And why did tellurium lead to the most bizarre gold rush in history? Similar books: The Violinist's Thumb by Sam Kean Periodic Tales by Hugh Aldersey-Williams The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons by Sam Kean Napoleon's Buttons by Penny Le Couteur The Elements by Theodore W. Gray The Alchemy of Air by Thomas Hager The 13th Element by John Emsley The Periodic Kingdom by Peter Atkins The Mystery of the Periodic Table by Benjamin Wiker Plutonium by Jeremy Bernstein Chemical Chaos by Nick Arnold Mendeleyev's Dream by Paul Strathern Great Feuds in Science by Hal Hellman The Elements by Philip Ball Nature's Building Blocks by John Emsley Aristotle Leads the Way by Joy Hakim Newton at the Center by Joy Hakim The Code Book by Simon Singh The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee