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

Sam Kean (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 12, 2010

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?

From the Big Bang to the end of time, it's all in THE DISAPPEARING SPOON.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Science magazine reporter Kean views the periodic table as one of the great achievements of humankind, "an anthropological marvel," full of stories about our connection with the physical world. Funny, even chilling tales are associated with each element, and Kean relates many. The title refers to gallium (Ga, 31), which melts at 84ËšF, prompting a practical joke among "chemical cognoscenti": shape gallium into spoons, "serve them with tea, and watch as your guests recoil when their Earl Grey ˜eats™ their utensils." Along with Dmitri Mendeleyev, the father of the periodic table, Kean is in his element as he presents a parade of entertaining anecdotes about scientists (mad and otherwise) while covering such topics as thallium (Tl, 81) poisoning, the invention of the silicon (Si, 14) transistor, and how the ruthenium (Ru, 44) fountain pen point made million for the Parker company. With a constant flow of fun facts bubbling to the surface, Kean writes with wit, flair, and authority in a debut that will delight even general readers. 10 b&w illus.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Like big-game hunters, scientists who stalked an undiscovered element courted peril: Marie Curie and Enrico Fermi both died from exposure to dangerous elements in the course of their experiments. But besides them and Dmitri Mendeleev, the deviser of the periodic table, which looms over science classrooms everywhere, few discoverers of the elements occupy the consciousness of even avid science readers. Kean rectifies that in this amble from element 1, hydrogen, to element 112, copernicium. Attaching stories to a human-interest angle, Kean ensures that with his elaboration of the fixation a chemist, physicist, industrialist, or artist had for a particular element comes clarity about why the element behaves as it does. The soft sell about proton numbers and electron shells thus closes the deal for Kean’s anecdotes about elements of war, elements of health, and elements of wealth, plus the title’s practical joke of a spoon (made from gallium). Whether explaining why Silicon Valley is not Germanium Valley or reveling in naming-rights battles over a new element, Kean holds interest throughout his entertaining debut. --Gilbert Taylor

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company; 1 edition (July 12, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316051640
• ISBN-13: 978-0316051644
• Product Dimensions: 6.3 x 1.3 x 9.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (251 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #17,512 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #59 in Books > Professional & Technical > Professional Science > Chemistry > General & Reference

More About the Author

Official bio: Sam Kean spent years collecting mercury from broken thermometers as a kid, and now he's a writer in in Washington, DC. His work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Mental Floss, Slate, and Science, and has been featured on NPR's "Radiolab" and "All Things Considered." The Disappearing Spoon, his first book, was a New York Times national bestseller. Read excerpts at http://www.samkean.com.

(un)Official bio: Sam Kean gets called Sean once a month. He grew up in South Dakota, which means more to him than it probably should. He's a fast reader but a very slow eater. He went to college in Minnesota and studied physics and English. He taught for a few years at an experimental charter school in St. Paul, where the kids showed up at night. After that, he tried to move to Spain (it didn't take) and ended up in Washington, D.C. He has a master's degree in library science he will probably never use. He wishes he had a sports team he was passionate about, but doesn't, though he does love track & field.

Amazon Author Rankbeta 

(What's this?)

#1 in Kindle eBooks > History

#7 in Books > History

#1 in Kindle eBooks > History

#7 in Books > History

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

314 of 321 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Accessible science for any age July 2, 2010

By Amy Henry TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

I have to confess I didn't pay much attention to chemistry. Once the instructor talked about electrons, protons, atoms and the nucleus I usually turned on my Walkman (the cassette kind, now antique!). It never seemed interesting because it wasn't something that related at all to real life. If I had a teacher like Sam Kean, however, that could have been different.

Fast forward too many years, and now I'm engrossed in this nonfiction 'memoir' of the Periodic Table of Elements. Like any good biography, this has scandal, lies, fraud, madness, explosions (!!!) and lots of name-dropping. Kean explains just what the periodic table is, but in a format that reads more like a novel, with anecdotal details to liven it up. Mercury pills were used by Lewis and Clark for their health? Yep, and you can trace their path (um, at least their bathroom trips on their journey) by where scientists have found unusually high amounts of mercury in the soil. The poet Robert Lowell? Did lithium ruin his work by making him sane? Who knew the lies and fraud and mind games played by scientists intent on getting a Nobel Prize!

There's no getting around it, this is a book that makes you think. It's not simple and it assumes you have a basic knowledge of science. Some areas were over my head, but not for long. Kean is a wonderful teacher with a sassy wise guy voice that livens up any of the deeper areas.

123 of 128 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Periodic Table Tour de Force July 13, 2010

By Eric R. Scerri

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Sam Kean has written a marvelous book that will delight general readers and experts alike. The writing is crisp and sharp and includes an unusual political savyness for somebody treating scientific issues. Kean uses his journalistic skills to succeed in doing what many, perhaps most, academics fail to do when presenting the relevance of chemistry to the real world. Not just applications but also how the history of individual elements has affected the lives of ordinary people. See for example his account of niobium and tantalum. Then there are chapters that weave together the lives of famous chemists and physicists such as one on Segre and Pauling, all in the context of the discovery of elements and developments in twentieth century chemistry and physics. Technicalities are kept to a minimum and when necessary explanations are provided in a clear and lucid manner.
Everybody should read this book, period.

Dr. Eric Scerri, author of The Periodic Table, Its Story and Its Significance, Oxford University Press, 2006.

285 of 317 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Suffers from lack of an expert editor August 7, 2011

By Howard L Ritter, Jr., M.D.

Format:Paperback

This book is worthwhile, interesting overall, and fascinating in places. I think it offers a good read to intelligent persons of almost any background. However, there are a number of glib misstatements, mis-characterizations, bumbled explanations, misspellings, and outright howlers that could have been caught and corrected by an editor with an ear for inelegant phrasing and a decent breadth of general scientific knowledge (i.e., the kind of knowledge that a popular-science-book editor ought to have). A few examples:

The author writes, "The body will rid itself of any poison, mercury included", as the explanation for the efficacy of a mercuric chloride laxative pill. This is both glib and inaccurate. It smacks of that kind of knowing, breezy folk wisdom that sounds right but is misleading or false. There are many noxious substances that elicit no gastrointestinal reaction at all when ingested, as well as many substances that elicit a reaction without being poisonous. In fact, the diarrheal action of mercuric chloride does not depend on its being a compound of a poisonous element.

The enzyme tryptophan synthetase is referred to as "a relative of [tryptophan]". It is not. Tryptophan synthetase is a protein and therefore a string of amino acid molecules, while tryptophan is simply one of many amino acids . Tryptophan synthetase catalyzes some of the reactions by which tryptophan is synthesized. Although tryptophan is by coincidence a component of tryptophan synthetase, the enzyme is not "related to" tryptophan any more than to any other of its constituent amino acids.

A real howler is the description of the collision of Comet Shoemaker-Levy with Jupiter as "the first intergalactic collision humans ever witnessed...." Wrong on two counts: The location was not intergalactic (occurring in the space between the galaxies, or involving more than one galaxy), but within not only our own galaxy but of course our Solar System; it should have been described as an "extraterrestrial" collision. And intergalactic collisions, those occurring between two galaxies, have been well known for decades and are easily observable, though we cannot see the action, as it were, since the movement is too slow on so vast a scale to be apparent on time scales of human history.

The author refers to Jupiter's prominent atmospheric feature informally and unconventionally as its "giant red spot" and "giant red eye", but nowhere by its common and widely recognized name, the Great Red Spot, which is how laymen, amateur astronomers, and professionals alike all know it. Using other terms in order to avoid being repetitive would be OK if he'd first referred to the feature by its universally known proper name.

In the discussion of atomic weights as given in the Periodic Table, he states that because of differing isotopic abundances, "in a different galaxy" the average atomic weights could be different. True, but not BECAUSE it's a different galaxy, as the usage implies. It would have been better to say "in a different location in space" or "in a different location in our galaxy". If, let's say, the point of a discussion is how the frost in Florida is affecting the price of the oranges we bring home from week to week, it wouldn't be relevant to say, "They cost 99 cents a pound at the market down the street, but in Australia the price might be higher or lower."

The phrase "Most solar systems probably formed from supernovae" is awkward and misleading. In the mind's eye, the phrase conjures the image of the debris clearing after a supernova explosion, revealing a star and its newborn dust cloud, ready to start forming a planetary system, or alternatively the idea that debris from a given supernova can condense somewhere else to form a planetary system. Neither of these, of course, is the case. The discussion would be improved by describing how supernovae actually do contribute to the formation of planetary systems: By synthesizing higher elements and blowing them off to enrich (but not to actually create) the interstellar medium (which consists of remnant hydrogen and helium from the formation of the galaxy), they provide the heavier material that will enable the later formation of solid stuff like planets; and their shock waves propagating through the interstellar medium trigger the condensation of areas of higher density, leading to formation of a star and its system. And, strictly speaking, the term "solar system" should be reserved for our own planetary system, the Solar System.

The author refers to the hypothesized dim star "Nemesis" as the Sun's "roaming companion star, around which the Earth circled too slowly for us to notice". This utterly baffling phraseology is partly incorrect and partly quite misleading. Nemesis would not "roam", implying a sort of meandering or wandering, but rather would move in a rigidly defined, highly eccentric (elongated) elliptical orbit around the Sun (or, rather, both would orbit their common center of mass in highly eccentric elliptical orbits). And the Earth would not orbit ("to circle", as a verb describing the Earth's motion, is neither accurate nor informally preferable to the correct verb "to orbit") the star Nemesis, of course, since Earth manifestly orbits the Sun. What would happen is that Nemesis and the Sun would orbit each other too slowly for us to notice any periodic irregularity in the path or motion of the Sun; and that (the very dim) Nemesis would spend so much of its orbital period far away from the Sun and the Earth that its existence has escaped our notice, while its 26-million-year close approaches to the Sun are what trigger disruptions in the orbits of asteroids, resulting in bombardment of Earth.

And that's only the first few chapters; I could go on, but won't.

This may seem like nitpicking, but a science book, in order to be fully worthwhile, needs to have its statements and claims factually correct and its language smooth and elegant. This book is worthwhile, and a second printing should first be reviewed and corrected by a broadly knowledgeable science-book editor with an ear for fumbled explanations and inelegant language. Read more ›

69 of 80 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A fun and interesting read! July 14, 2010

By Ryan C.

Format:Hardcover

I love books but only have so much time, so I'm pretty careful about what I choose to read. I heard great things about this book through word of mouth, and it didn't disappoint! Kean does a masterful job of explaining the interesting facts and stories behind the elements that make up our universe in a way that's easy to understand and fun to read. Especially for people like me, who love to learn...but maybe spent more time in high school science class shooting spitwads than actually reading our boring text books! With "The Disappearing Spoon," Kean truly makes science and history come alive--I highly recommend!

24 of 26 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Worth its weight in Au July 24, 2010

By E. Jacobs TOP 1000 REVIEWER

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

This book is going to join a very select group of those which I have read multiple times. There is so much fun and interesting information in this work that I suspect I will keep finding new things upon another go-around. Sam Kean has created what is truly a scientific masterpiece with this book.

Breaking up the periodic table into various sections which blend the elements into tales of science, politics, medicine, and philosophy--to name just a few--Kean pulls off the magic trick of making the dreaded periodic table exciting and interesting again. There is no shortage of future conversation-starting facts and tidbits in this book. I confess that in some parts I had to go through it rather slowly to make sure I understood what I was reading, because the breadth of the book is very impressive and roams all over physics and chemistry. But trust me when I say that I have serious doubts that anyone could have made the science more accessible than the author of this book. It may be the case that experts in some of the more esoteric areas about which he writes might quibble about over-simplification, but for the general reader, the book is a fine example of how to bring science out of its perceived shell of boredom.

This book was an absolute trifecta for me, including science, humor, and suspense wrapped up with some brilliant writing into a near-perfect package. I read it on my Kindle but am going to buy a hard copy for my library. A big thank-you to Sam Kean for such an enjoyable read.