Customer Reviews

Transforming Matter: A History of Chemistry from Alchemy to the Buckyball (Johns Hopkins Introductory Studies in the History of Science)

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

 

 

The one-sentence review runs thus: anyone with an appreciation for science and/or history, particularly both, will enjoy this book.

The author, Trevor Levere, is obviously a consummate historian, with thorough knowledge of the workings of science and its development through the ages. Levere has a keen sense of the humanity and little ironies that make up the twists and turns of the shaping of the state of chemical knowledge at various times, and conveys them in a friendly, readable style. I found the discussion of the various approaches to gases and how knowledge of the gas laws came out out of them particularly interesting (and did you know Robert Boyle in his day was considered an "alchemist"?). The author is very good about zeroing in on the most fertile areas of discovery and expounding upon what came out of them.

There are only a couple of minor problems that don't have much impact on the overall flow of the book. One is that Faraday and electrochemistry were introduced rather abruptly, with no information about where charge-sign and current conventions came from. It was something I wanted to learn about, and felt it was rather conspicuously absent. The other is the final chapter, about 20th century chemical discoveries (DNA, buckyballs, yadda yadda), which seemed a bit meandering and aimless as a whole.

But overall, excellent, very accessible. Don't hesitate.

Transforming Matter: A History Of Chemistry From Alchemy To The Buckyball is a college-level discourse on the history of chemistry and will serve as a fine basic introduction for any studying the history of science as a whole. Chapters begin with early alchemy to survey the rise of theories about the elements, the creation of classification systems, and relationships between scientific method and practices. An excellent and highly recommended introduction.

I'm impressed. This book was written and published in academia. Any of my readers can tell you I have less that a good opinion of the ability of those in academia to write science so that we can understand it, let alone enjoy it. This is one book that managed to do just that, and no, I am not selling it as I need it for my poor students who have horrible textbooks to waddle through. This book not only managed to answer questions that I've had during time when I was a student learning chemistry, a graduate using chemistry in the lab, and now an instructor of chemistry...but it also tied everything together in a nice, fairly short package and get a little physics in there too (as it is hard to totally nonsurgically remove these two topics from being intertwined with each other). This is a book I highly recommend to be used as recommended reading or even required reading for students, since it did not cost much and made so many things much clearer than the more expensive textbooks did. The book introduces the r eader to almost all the major ideas and concepts in chemistry, ties them from the alchemist of the 1700s to the experimenters of the 1800s and so on, and allows the students to make a choice of whether to go on and read much more by giving a decent bibliography.

I am going to see if I can find more in these books and series that are as well-written as this book is. Science needs to be understood by everyone, and we should have the choice of whether to take advantage of its accessibility. We shouldn't have to deal with the idea that seems to be cherished among many of the elite at the Ivy League schools that we don't need to be scientifically-literate as announced by the President of Princeton last year when he said that women could not do science...somebody forgot to tell Marie Curie that, and the thousands of women who have worked in and loved science since then. It isn't his decision. It's ours, and every child in this country has a right to equal access to the same information, especially if we work our butts off trying to achieve that equality!

Karen L. Sadler
Chemistry and Science Education
U of PIttsburgh
Community College of Allegheny County

It might well be that it is just the fact that this beautifully written book gave ME so many ideas and insights that I glow as I do. THANK YOU Professor Levere. I am not a chemist by training or career but by love of minerals and curiousity. I have read parts of several books on chemistry and never quite got the clue. The author's skillful use of history, intent, complications and solutions have given me what was lacking elsewhere. This includes the Norton History of Chemistry which was somewhat enlightening but couldn't hold nor explain as well...not that that is a bad book, just that this is better: by my lights, much better.
Perhaps it is that the book fell into my hands when the ground was finally prepared, that might well be the case. The fact remains that I found it easy to read, well thought out with good explanations of things I'd missed before.
I cannot but think that were this given to our school children by good teachers, we in the USA might have less of the generational groupings of self-satisfied, fame-seeking students that stagger be-dizzened from our schools with little grasp of any history or direction.
To repeat: an easy read and more than worth the money!
Buy the book!

The 3 stars given are meaningless because I haven't bought this book. May be it deserves more, may be less. I just wish to explain why, although tempted, I haven't bought it.
Roughly speaking, 90% of our chemical knowledge have been discovered in the 20th century. So I found the title "...from Alchemy to the Buckyball" most appealing. I thought : "this is one of those rare books which discuss also modern chemistry".
When examining the index however, I haven't found the following names : Barton, Butenandt, Corey, Cornforth, Fukui, Haworth, Hoffmann, Lehn, Natta, Prelog, Robinson, Ruzicka, Taub,Wieland, Windaus, Woodward, Ziegler..., all Nobel Prize winners. Not to mention other outstanding chemists like Eschenmoser or Stork.
This may be a very good book for the history of chemistry up to the beginning of the 20th century, it is not a history of the whole science of chemistry. So, with much regret, I did not buy it.