Customer Reviews

The Mystery of the Periodic Table (Living History Library)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

The "Mystery of the Periodic Table" is that it makes learning fun! My son really likes this book! It keeps you entertained and is much easier to read than a typical old boring chemistry textbook! Highly recommend as a first step in introducing the periodic table to any child!

I purchased this for my 7 year old son. He's been obsessed with chemistry and physics since toddler age. Unlike most books in the genre for children, this title did not treat the subject as a strait history on great figures in science, but rather, melded a great deal of chemistry into the book. It's a challenge to find books on science for my son's age that do not underestimate his capacity to understand scientific concepts. Clearly written for 6th grade and above, I have no hesitation in recommending this book for younger children with an more than a fleeting interest in chemistry.

As an 8th grade physical science teacher, I highly recommend this book for children and adults. It is very well-written, fun, interesting, and at times -- fascinating. I recommend this book as a must-read to any middle school or high school student that wants to pursue a career in the sciences, or any college student that needs to play catch-up. I recommend this book to other science teachers, and this book has made me a better science teacher -- it's that good! For non-scientists, I think it is a great history book that allows the reader to marvel at how humankind can work together, build and build upon the ideas of previous generations, struggle with mistakes for decades, and finally arrive at a brilliant understanding of something far too small to see or touch. It is amazing that human beings figured this all out, and this book tells this amazing story of human achievement. I love this book.

The biographical information is interesting but some of the chemistry information is too deep for my children (12, 9, 7) who are listening to me read this. I think it would work better if I read the chapters ahead and just pulled out the interesting parts and explained the concept the chapter wants to get across in a simpler format.

This book is a history of chemistry from the stone age to the development of the periodic table, including the artificially-produced elements, plus a brief but tantalizing introduction to the hundreds of subatomic particles. If that sounds excruciatingly dull, all the more credit is due the author. Wiker obviously finds his subject fascinating, and explains it all clearly enough even for a mother who hadn't touched a chemistry text since 1975, with intriguing anecdotes of actual experiments and the curious characters who carried them out. Technical illustrations by T. Schluenderfritz are very helpful as well.

Wiker presents both the power of the scientific method to arrive at truth over time, and the bizarre deviations caused by temporarily-held theories in the interim. My fifth-grader cheered on the historical characters as they made breakthroughs, reinforcing his appreciation for the scientific method, but at the same time he was moved to wonder which current theories will eventually prove false. I couldn't ask more of bedtime reading.

The author writes with a light touch and although I bought this for my homeschooling grandchildren, I very much enjoyed reading it myself. I am inspired to read more about some of the scientists he write about, such as Lavoisier. My granddaughter is too young (8) to read this herself, but sometimes I tell her stories from it and she enjoys them, laying groundwork for her later education.

In addition to the routine issues (arrived promptly in good condition), the seller was flexible enough to change the shipping destination after 1-click purchasing had defaulted to my home address. I was sending this to my grandson in another city, and the seller had no problem changing the shipping address.