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140 of 141 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Everybody CAN understand Science, July 24, 2003
This review is from: The Mystery of the Periodic Table (Living History Library) (Paperback)
This terrific book helps make a complex area of science - the field of chemistry and the periodic table - accessible to everyone. Benjamin Wiker skillfully and humorously takes us through the history of theories, experiments, mistakes and successes in understanding the elements and the development of the Periodic Table. The icing on the cake is how fascinating the order of the table is and how closely and mathematically the elements are related to each other. Fascinating! The book is written for ages 10 and up, but high schoolers and even college students would benefit from the memorable way this book presents the big picture and helps it 'stick.' The last three chapters are a little tougher to follow. I found it helpful to draw some of my own diagrams of the various atoms and their electron structure.
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117 of 120 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
good popular science, August 29, 2003
This review is from: The Mystery of the Periodic Table (Living History Library) (Paperback)
By putting over 3,000 years of faces on the search for the elemental principles -- from the Greek philosopher Anaximander, who held that all the material world was made of four "elements", Earth, Air, Fire, and Water; to teams of modern scientists who race to create new elements -- Benjamin Wiker has moved chemistry off the shelf of dry-and-dusty arcania and given the reader a gum-shoe tale filled with odd and interesting characters. This book is an excellent remedy for people who think the sciences were hatched in university laboratories, or born the test-tube children of egg-headed professors. Tracing the theories of philosophers, alchemists, and scientists, making acquaintance with men of all walks and many nationalities, whose only common trait was their persistent desire to peer ever deeper into the nature of things, Wiker not only outlines the genealogy of the Periodic Table of Elements, but, so doing, introduces his reader to the principles of theoretical and practical science, to the history of the scientific method, and even inklings of atomic theory. This book will be accessible, and of interest, to a wide range of readers: those with no science background can still follow the general story with ease, while even the reader well-versed in high-school level chemistry has probably never encountered the history of modern chemistry synthesized with such clarity and appeal.
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22 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
a brief history of the periodic table, October 15, 2009
This review is from: The Mystery of the Periodic Table (Living History Library) (Paperback)
It is a very good idea to explain to teens how the periodic table was made and the book reads well. Some mistakes are irritating. For instance, the scientific community has not replaced azote (proposed by Lavoisier)by nitrogen: Nitrogen is the English term, effectively proposed by another Frenchman, Chaptal, but the French still use azote to name the substance.
The historical part is fair, the part showing that the periodic table explains some rules of chemistry in nature is weak and comes too late and the part showing that the table can be used to guess the properties of elements is sorely understated.
It seems to me that to be excited by the history of the periodic table, one should know first that it is useful. The author made a mistake by diving into history without making the aim attractive.
I hope there will be a second better edition, because it would be nice to have a great book for teens on the subject.
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