Customer Reviews

The Periodic Kingdom: A Journey Into The Land Of The Chemical Elements (Science Masters Series)

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

The previous reviewers split between two camps - those who think this book is oversimplified and those who like the book.

The main point is that this is NOT an academic text book, so that somebody who studies chemistry academically wouldnt benefit much from it, but rather a popular science book, intended to present complicated material that should be accessable to everybody in a way understandable to the average Joe.

That the explanations are simplified is the only solution, considering that the average Joe didnt study quantum mechanics.

The book is not big, but it's supposed to be fun and easy to read, and it's price tag isnt big either.

I like this book a lot - it presents the material in a readable and enjoyable way, making this basic science (and shouldnt everybody understand basic chemistry ?) accessable to everybody.

Though I studied chemistry in high-school and a bit of inorganic chemistry in university, I enjoyed the way the presentation and got another angle on the subject.

If you don't know a thing about science, particularly chemistry, or someone who prefers to read science in a casual approach, go for this book.

If you're hard-score sciencist and especially a chemist, go ahead but don't expect this book to fulfill all your savors and wonders.

I tend to agree on one of the previous review commenting on this book being a 6th grade reader - well, the point is, what's wrong with it being an easy and pleasurable reading? If Atkins gives a detailed, hard-core account of the periodic table in this book, the non-science folks will probably not even make to page 5! Less all the quantum mechanics, wave mechanics and Bohr model and electron spin.... This book certainly spices up readers' curiosity with interesting easy-to-relate analogies. For those who would like to read some chemistry on an airplane flying across the continent, this book will definitely not wear you out. Chemists, chemistry students and hard-core scientists...it's ok to take a break from all the obscure theories and amuse at Atkin's canny account of the periodic table that is so familiar to you.

As a pharmacist, I've taken years of advanced chemistry courses. I wish that I'd had this book (The Periodic Kingdom) available during pharmacy school- it would have helped to elucidate some of the most fundamental, yet hard-to-grasp concepts in chemistry. Right now, I'm using Professor Atkins' insightful illumination of the atomic world to help explain these concepts to my 6th-grade son. It beats the dry 6th-grade text any day. I can't praise this book enough.

As a physicist, I have always felt I understood the basic concepts of atomic structure, the Bohr atom through the Dirac treatment of relativistic electrons and that was enough about chemistry that I needed to know. Of course, that was a very shortsighted point of view and did nothing for a practical understanding of how the elements interact. This book gives a wonderful introduction to just that topic. It starts off with an overview of how the basic properties of the elements vary, in a systematic way, across the periodic table. The books metaphor of a new land, makes it amazingly easy to remember these properties. Nothing else I've read has been as successful as conveying this. I would buy this book for the first four chapters alone. There are, of course, some problems with the book. For one, the author seems to have gotten a "new word a day" calendar and seems to feel the need to use them. ("Complexity can effloresce from subtly different consanguinity.") But fortunately, these are few and far between. Could a non-technical person read and enjoy this book? I have no idea but I would recommend they try.

Through an ingenious geography analogy, P. W. Atkins offers an entertaining and insightful exploration of the periodic table. We initially observe the periodic kingdom from a great height and see the expansive metallic Western desert bounded by the Western Rectangle - a region occupied by the Alkali Metals and the Alkali Earth Metals - and the Eastern Rectangle - the realm of Carbon, Nitrogen, and Oxygen, the excitable Halogens, the Noble Gases, and other non-metallic elements (countries). To the south lies the distant, seldom visited Southern Island of the Lanthanides and Actinides.

Atkins divided his book, "The Periodic Kingdom", into three sections: Geography (chapters 1-3), History (chapters 4-7), and Government and Institutions (chapters 8-11).

The three Geography chapters include the terrain, the products of each region, and physical geography. Physical geography is more challenging with maps of atomic masses, atomic diameters, elemental densities, and ionization energies. But don't stop. Atkins is only illustrating that the periodic kingdom is characterized by gradual changes, not by random fluctuations at country (element) borders. In succeeding chapters we discover that these changes exhibit a periodic pattern.

The four History chapters - the discovery of the periodic kingdom, the naming of the countries, the "geologic" history of this land, and the major cartographers - are fascinating and easy going for the non-chemist.

The final chapters on Government and Institutions offer a non-mathematical look at quantum physics that governs both the nucleus (Laws of the Interior) and the electron cloud (Laws of the Exterior). Despite the inherent difficulty of atomic physics, this section is quite readable and will not intimidate most readers.

Some reviewers roundly criticized Atkins for overworking his kingdom analogy and argued that he should have transitioned earlier to standard chemistry nomenclature. I mildly agree with these sentiments, but I suspect that Atkins' primary audience, the literate layman looking for a comprehensible overview of chemistry, will find his kingdom analogy to be both entertaining and helpful.

P. W. Atkins has authored widely used textbooks on general chemistry and organic chemistry as well as more advanced texts on physical chemistry. For the reader enticed to explore chemistry further, I suggest reading Chapter 7, titled Atomic Structure and the Periodic Table, in Atkins' text "General Chemistry", second edition, which can be purchased used on Amazon at a greatly reduced price.

For all readers I highly recommend Primo Levi's "The Periodic Table", an intriguing memoir of a young Italian chemist, a Jew living in Mussolini's Italy. He titled each chapter with the name of an element that played some role in that particular chapter. Look at the reader reviews. "The Periodic Table" is an exceptional literary work.

This book presents the very basics of the chemical elements and the organization of the periodic table. Atkins' unique approach is to present the material in the form of an analogy, or even an extended metaphor, with the chemical elements as a kingdom, complete with geographical regions, history, laws, and institutions. Along these lines, the book is divided into 3 parts: Geography, History, and Government and Institutions. At the end of the book are found a short list of items for further reading, an index, and a periodic table.

The geographical approach is quite appealing, but somehow falls short of its goal of making the material easily accessible to non-chemists. Describing the sections of the periodic table as having geographic correlates has a lot of explanatory potential. Unfortunately, the maps that are used to illustrate the concepts are presented in varying directions (sometimes from the North looking South, sometimes from the South looking North, etc.), but without directional symbols for orientation. Although orientational clues are generally provided in the captions, interpreting the maps is still far from easy, especially since the elements are not labeled. Readers who don't have a thorough familiarity with the periodic table will find it useful to study these maps with a periodic table in hand for comparison, hence the usefulness of the periodic table that is included at the back of the book. (Unfortunately, I never discovered this table until I had already read the book through, since it isn't referenced anywhere in the text.)

One reason I picked up this book is that I have always been fascinated with the organization of the elements in the period table. I know there are alternative forms for representing the organization of the elements, such as the 3-D Periodic Round Table, which shows continuities between sub-groups rather than simple column edges. I'd like to know more about why our usual 2-D periodic table is arranged the way it is, and what relationships are encoded in its presentation. Atkins touches on these subjects with both historical information and discussion of chemical properties and bonds. However, I found his prose often obtuse, and after reading the book, I'm still unclear about many of the key issues. It seems as though the metaphor of the elements as a kingdom sometimes gets pushed a bit too far and hinders rather than helps clarity. Nevertheless, the book does have some interesting sections and up-to-date information about basic chemistry.

Ordered this book recently and thought that it was an excellent one. Yes, the constant analogies to landscapes will start to grate on an adult after a while and perhaps Dr. Atkins should have toned that down, but other than that I felt that the book was well organised and fundamental concepts introduced in a simple and physically intuitive manner. Prof. Atkins has a way with explaining concepts in a clear and logical fashion-his text book on quantum mechanics has been one of the best that I have read-and this book is yet another example. I think children in the middle-high school range will like this book. And for someone with a decent background in chemistry and physics, the book gives a wonderful view of the way Dr. Atkins has tried to see and understand atomic behavior.

P.W. Atkins' The Periodic Kingdom is an introduction to chemistry using the periodic table elements as a map to an imaginary land. If you like watching Doppler weather radar on the television news or reading charts in USA Today, you'll probably like Atkin's presentation; it's a visual book and shows the various connections among what might otherwise be unrelated graphs and charts. Why is the periodic table laid out in such a strange manner? Atkins takes you on a tour to get the "lay of the land" and teaches you some chemistry along the way.

I took chemistry in high school and I wish I had this book then. If you learn through analogies, then this might be a good book for you. My only quarrel with the book is that there weren't enough examples and Atkins glosses over a few things that piqued my interest. Still, Atkins writes with graceful confidence, something you can do only if you know your subject.

I agree with the review by Publishers Weekly, which stated that this book is "remarkably tedious." The concept of likening the periodic table of chemical elements to a landscape is near brilliant. It could have worked so wonderfully well, if only it had been better done. The author of this book was... at the time of its writing... a middle-aged British university professor, and he writes like you would expect him to talk. It takes forever to dredge through the written material to get to a gleaming nugget of knowledge. It's rather like watching an English movie from the 1940s. Another GLARING deficiency of this book is the lack of adequate visual representations. There are a few black and white line drawings of the "landscape" of the periodic table, with the components thereof very poorly labeled. What this book needs is a quite thorough editing and modernizing by an American editor. It's sad that this book could have been so very much more than it is. And it is not too late for that potential to be fulfilled. I hope against hope, that the publisher will update this book and thereby enable it to be the effective teaching tool that it could be.

This work covers the fine nuances of the Periodic Table of
elements from the East or p-block to the West s-block.
It describes how classic metals evolved. For instance, the
use of Cu. came out of the Stone Age. Iron, cobalt,
manganese and other metals were utilized to shape steel.
Dolomite is found in Italy and titanium in the West Desert.
This book would be very helpful in understanding how the
various metals and non-metals evolved. In addition, the permanent
position on the Table of Elements is explained.