Customer Reviews

Nature's Building Blocks: An A-Z Guide to the Elements

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John Emsley writes excellent books on chemistry and Emsley's The Elements [3rd Edition] is an indispensable guide to the chemical elements for scientists. However, a layperson delving into The Elements may find it tough going because of its myriad numbers and tiny tidbits of text. In Nature's Building Blocks, Emsley dispenses with most of the numbers and expands the tidbits of text into page length essays on each element. Even though the book is clearly a reference book, the section on each element is an enjoyable read. Each section is divided into subsections that relate the element's significance to the cosmos, humans, food, medicine, history, war, economics, the environment, and then ends with a section called the Element of Suprise [one element's suprise is that there is nothing that Emsley could find to say about it that was suprising]. This book contains the kind of information I need as a chemistry and earth science teacher in a high school to spice up discussions on the elements. All laypeople with an interest in chemistry need a copy of this excellent book. Every high school library in the country should have a copy of this book on their shelves.

There's got to be a lot of folks out there like myself who at one point or another had some genuine interest in science as a topic but had that enthusiasm crushed by what passes for "science education" in our schools. Between nerdy and boring teachers in middle and high school and science texts whose only real point seems to be rendering the reading of statutory tax law or specifications for sewer pipe manufacturing seem exciting. People who were not necessarily destined to be scientists but who gladly would have dived into the subject had there been any incentive whatsoever to do so.

Well, you can dive in to Nature's Building Blocks: An A-Z Guide to the Elements by John Emsley and plan to stay as long as you want. This is science presented with the flair and wit that, if more widely employed, would make studying science a lot more palatable to many students.

Emsley is a respected science text writer, so he knows the subject inside out. His aim here is to inform and entertain both. The elements appear alphabetically. Information encompasses the basics of the element's structure and abundance in the world, common uses, it's significance to human health and disease and the impact it has on our lives in general. There's a closing "Element of Surprise" that covey's an interesting fact about the substance.

The essays are long enough to be informative and short enough to keep attention from wandering. This is the sort of book you can either read right through or leave around and sample every now and then.

Overall, an excellent general guide and reference book students and their parent's can both enjoy and find useful.

I was looking for a good book on the elements over the last few years and kept drawing a blank. The few I found were too technical, too simple, or involved strange treatments. Than I found this book! It was exactly what I wanted. A complete treatment of the elements of the periodic table alphabetically arranged. When I first found it I thought I would test it out by checking a rather obscure biological fact- certain tunicates (ascidians) concentrate vanadium in their blood. On p. 486 I found the reference with one error- Ascidia was called a "worm" (it is a Urochordate). However, the author made up for this by noting under copper that snails, spiders, octopi and oysters utilize that element as part of an oxygen-carrying blood pigment, making their blood pale blue.

Other entries were just as fascinating. The sections for each element cover such subjects as human involvement (biologically- including food and medicine), history, economics, environmental associations, chemical properties and "Element of Surprise" - little known facts regarding the element in question.

Where else could you find the origin of Teflon, the history of lead, the use of a salt of nitrogen to inflate airbags, or that thorium oxide was injected into patients during early X-ray diagnosis? These, and a host of other facts, are presented in exacting detail in "Nature's Building Blocks: An A-Z Guide to the Elements."

This is a very much-needed book for anybody requiring a good reference on the chemical elements. It is also a very good read!

This book is as great as all the other reviewers say. It's the kind of book that's fun to explore -- each entry is self contained, and there are also a few short sections on the elements in general (for example, a history of the periodic table).

The only negative comment I have is the poor copy editing. There are numerous spelling and grammatical errors. In the periodic table section alone, on one page, there were three spelling errors and three numerical errors. Needless to say, this is a especially problematic with a reference work...

This book is so much fun to read. Some might consider it not scientific enough, but for me, a person that reads a lot of scientific materials, it was a welcome change of pace. Emsley gathered many interesting facts about each element and presents them in a very delightful and organized manner. I put the book on my night stand and use it as bed-time story book. It's that good.

Although it looks like a textbook, "Nature's Building Blocks" reads like a collection of bedtime stories -- fascinating information about each of the elements, including things that are common-sense but you may never have thought of and stuff that's just gee-whiz cool and unexpected. Like a collection of bedtime tales, you needn't start at the beginning and go to the end -- you can pick any element you like and enjoy the delicious nuggets of information.

The book suffers from a disturbing number of awkward sentences -- it deserves a much better copy editor for the next edition!

This won't replace a chemist's CRC Handbook for sheer amounts of data, but unlike CRC it's a heck of a lot of fun to read.

I've been teaching chemistry for the last three semester at our local community college. Never mind the fact that my major was in neuroscience (emphasis on studying disease in the brain). I had loads of chemistry classes, so it wasn't like I was coming into these classrooms with no previous knowledge.

But I've been having problems first of all with the quality of the textbooks recommended to teach with...actually, had to beg the school to get a different book because the chem textbook they were using was very wrong in so many problems and even basic text. Not only was I finding them, but the students were finding them also.

The next problem I'm having is the overwhelming emphasis put in general chemistry on math, rather than on the science of chemistry and the elements. Yes, the students need basic algebraic constructs, but if all the teaching in chemistry is mathematically-related, I lose my students very quickly in an area which can be loads of fun to study (given a great teacher who knows how to teach it...which I luckily had two great teachers in chemistry).

So I've been looking at the books being recommended to me by Amazon.com, and this is the third book. I liked the other ones. They were fun and had some hilarious history, but first of all I want my students to become really familiar with the periodical table and all of the elements. All the math in the world, without a basic understanding of the elements is going to lead no where, especially since my students are usually going into medical fields.

This book is clean and concisely written, and I can hardly wait to use it this coming semester.

Karen Sadler
Chemistry
Community Colleg of Allegheny County

I enjoyed reading this book but I'm not going to repeat what others have already written and eulogize the book's organization and content. You can also "Look Inside" and get a pretty good idea of what the book has to offer.

My criticisms are as follows. As some reviewers have stated, the book needs an index. Much could be gained from being able to cross-reference names of elements and compounds. Since index-generating software has been around since the computer stone age, there is no good excuse for not providing one. The table of contents is also too pithy. There is a major section called "The Lanthanides" that isn't even in the table of contents. While it is true, that someone who reads the whole book will eventually stumble across it, it is also true that it isn't an element A-Z and someone who uses this book only as a reference may never discover it.

Another gripe is that while the section called "The Periodic Table" may be a fairly good historical discussion, it is a terrible technical discussion. It offers a disorganized and almost scatterbrained explanation of what a "group" or a "period" is. Readers may also want to know what a "transition element" is and why the lanthanides and actinides are in detached rows. And, why not have a section called "Actinides" since the astute reader may wonder why there is a Lanthanide section but not one for the Actinides? Emsley's discussion of orbitals is so poorly done and mostly confusing to the point that its very existence is irritating. A good discussion of orbitals should have been a core part of the book. Few readers will care about the history of the Periodic Table but a good discussion of orbitals is not easy to find--look elsewhere.

Emsley is sometimes wrong on the facts, probably more times than one can know. As a student of geology I was surprised that the concluding statement in the Element Of Surprise discussion under Iridium was just plain wrong. Even back in 2001, when this book was printed, it was acknowledged by all but a few holdouts that an asteroid collision at the end of the Cretaceous was the primary reason for the extinction of 75% of the life on earth and not just a "contributing factor" as Emsley erroneously states. With many smoking guns, i.e., shocked quartz, iridium deposits at the KT boundary, evidence of KT mega-tsunamis and the finding of the impact crater itself, most geologists knew by the early 90's that a comet strike was the main reason for the extinction. By 2001, this was old news. In the Mercury section, he says that it's not unsafe to eat tuna and swordfish that have concentrated mercury in their flesh. Though this is a 2001 book, it's been known for at least 30 years that it's not safe to eat large amounts of certain kinds of fish. This applies especially to children and pregnant women. But even more disturbing, is that in the section on gold, Emsley says that gravity is responsible for accelerating the electrons to near the speed of light in a gold atom. No it's not! The gravitational force is negligible at the atomic level, and if what he says is even true, then the electric force is responsible for this acceleration. And, to view atomic structure as electrons orbiting the nucleus is a grammar school view of physics. It's really a lot more complicated than that, involves quantum mechanics and is poorly understood. One wonders how many other areas he writes about were as poorly researched as these. Since he makes thousands of such statements throughout the book, with no direct references to back anything up (just a bibliography), I would double-check everything he says before quoting him.

In spite of its several flaws, the book has much to offer, just be sure to keep your antennae up at all times. I have chosen not to buy it, and have instead, checked it out of the library several times, hoping for a revision someday, though that isn't bound to happen anytime soon since most of the information won't change much. Hopefully, Emsley will brush up on some of his facts, though I can't see that happening either.

I keep this book by my bedside table, and read an element each night before falling asleep. It's loaded with factoids that will bring a smile to your face and amaze your friends. For example, did you know that even 0.5 microgram of Tellurium will give you bad breath for up to 30 hours? Or that Charles II died of mercury poisoning because he did alchemical experiments in a poorly ventilated room in his palace? I'm reading the book cover-to-cover, but I know that in the future I'll want to dip into it again and again.

My only criticism, and it's minor, is that I wish the chapter headings (e.g., "Indium") contained the info summarized in the chemical element table (symbol, atomic number, atomic weight) at the end of the chapter.

This is an outstanding piece of work aimed at the intellectually and scientifically curious that also works as a nice reference book on the elements and the Periodic Table.

After a short introduction filled with some top ten tables (e.g., top ten elements in the earth's crust: "Oxygen 466,000" parts per million, "Silicon 277,000" p.p.m., etc.) Emsley spins out a chapter per element in alphabetical order beginning with Actinium and ending with Zirconium. Each chapter is filled with interesting and specific information about the element in question. In the chapter on carbon, for example--understandably one of the longest in the book (7 pages), since carbon is so important to us and so plentiful--there are sections entitled "COSMIC ELEMENT, HUMAN ELEMENT, FOOD ELEMENT, MEDICAL ELEMENT, ELEMENT OF HISTORY, ELEMENT OF WAR, ECONOMIC ELEMENT, ENVIRONMENTAL ELEMENT, CHEMICAL ELEMENT," and "ELEMENT OF SURPRISE."

The idea is to place each element in terms of its importance in these various categories as well as giving all sorts of information about its history, abundance and uses. In the ELEMENT OF SURPRISE section Emsley usually comes up with something unusual or striking about the use or the history of the element. In the case of iron, Emsley cites a research project that "fertilized" a barren part of the ocean west of the Galapagos Islands with iron sulfate with dramatic results: "Within a week this barren span of ocean bloomed and turned green with plankton, proving that it was simply lack of this metal that was limiting their growth." (p. 211)

Included in the sections are tables showing how much of the element is in the human body (in the blood, in bones and tissues), and how much is in the environment (in the crust, in the soil, in sea water, and the atmosphere). A third table gives the element's chemical symbol, its atomic number, its atomic weight, melting point, boiling point, density and oxides, if any.

There is a final chapter on the history and development of the Periodic Table, which I found interesting. One of Emsley's strengths is his ability to make the material just so fascinating to read. Part of that comes from his obvious love for his subject matter. He is so good he makes me regret that I did not study chemistry when I was young. Just reading this book has opened my eyes to some of the ideas of chemistry and has greatly improved my knowledge of what the elements are like and how they interact with one another to form various molecules as they become familiar and not so familiar substances.

Here are examples of some of the fascinating details that can be found in the book:

"Iridium is the most corrosion-resistant metal known... The standard metre bar, kept in Paris, is made of a platinum-iridium alloy (90% platinum and 10% iridium) but this was superseded as the basic unit of length in 1960 by a line in the atomic spectrum of krypton (see p. 213)."

And on page 213 we find that "The standard was changed in 1983 to one based on the speed of light in a vacuum, a metre being the distance light travelled in 1/299 793 458th of a second, as measured by a light beam from a helium-neon laser."

"Inside the body, iron, as iron(III), is strongly bound by transferrin, a protein found in serum and other secretions... Transferrin binds iron tightly and, because it does so, it acts as a powerful antibiotic simply by denying this essential metal to any invading bacteria which need iron to multiply. As soon as our body registers a bacterial invasion, it produces more transferrin to mop up any free iron in the blood stream and 'hide' it in the liver." (p. 206)

"Neodymium-iron-boron (NIB) magnets are so powerful that those handling them must wear protective glasses--they fly together with such force that they can shatter and send splinters flying in all directions. At times young people have used these industrial magnets to attach ornaments to their cheeks by putting one of the small magnets on the inside of the mouth. However, the magnet and ornament have then proved impossible to pull apart, sometimes necessitating a visit to a hospital for surgical removal." (p. 270)

I have two suggestions for the next edition: (1) provide an index; (2) give us the value of the elements in terms of current (or relative) dollars or Euros. It would be fun to compare. (I realize that in some cases, the value of an element because it is so rare or not used for anything would be just an educated guess, but that's okay.)

Another interesting book by John Emsley is The Thirteenth Element: The Sordid Tale of Murder, Fire, and Phosphorus (2000). See my review.