Customer Reviews

Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood

5 star:		(68)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

"It often happens that the mind of a person who is learning a new science, has to pass through all the phases which the science itself has exhibited in its historical evolution." (Stanislao Cannizzaro, Italian chemist, 1826 - 1910).

These words had a powerful resonance for Oliver Sacks. When the gifted neurologist wrote his autobiography, he also wrote a history of chemistry as recapitulated through his own childhood experiences. He grew up in a very scientific family--his mother and father were physicians, and his uncle Dave (the 'Uncle Tungsten' of the title) was both a chemist and a business entrepreneur, who "would spend hundreds of hours watching all the processes in his factories: the sintering and drawing of the tungsten, the making of the coiled coils and molybdenum supports for the filaments, the filling of the bulbs with argon..."

Uncle Tungsten allowed his nephew to perform chemical experiments in his laboratory, which contained samples of almost every element. Oliver's "physics uncle," Uncle Abe had a small telescopic observatory on top of his house, where he demonstrated the wonders of spectroscopy to his nephew: "The whole visible universe--planets, stars, distant galaxies--presented itself for spectroscopic analysis, and I got a vertiginous, almost ecstatic satisfaction from seeing familiar terrestrial elements out in space, seeing what I had known only intellectually before, that the elements were not just terrestrial but cosmic, were indeed the building blocks of the universe."

No wonder young Oliver grew up with a love for the elements and their chemistry!

Rarely do I read an autobiography and envy the author his childhood--most recent examples of this genre, e.g. "A Child Called 'It'" are grim, wailing texts--and that's not to say that Oliver didn't have his bad moments, too. He endured two horrible years at a Dickensian boarding school while London was being bombed by the Germans.

For the most part though, his formative years were spent in a fantastic 'castle of the elements' where his "many uncles and aunts and cousins served as a sort of archive or reference library" to his enquiring mind.

In "Uncle Tungsten," Dr. Sacks shares his learning experiences with us and in the process, writes a far more lucid history of chemistry and physics than any I've ever found in a textbook. He also takes his readers on a mesmerizing, personalized tour of the elements. If you enjoyed P.W. Atkin's quirky "The Periodic Kingdom" or Primo Levi's wonderful memoir "The Periodic Table," I can almost guarantee you'll fall in love with "Uncle Tungsten."

Oliver Sacks, best known for writing about the fantastic consequences of neurological abnormalities (Awakenings, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat), takes us on a journey through his childhood in Uncle Tungsten. Deftly mixing the most intriguing aspects of the history of chemistry with his own experiences as a boy and adding the spark of a unique writing ability, he's utilized the principles of chemical lab work to produce something new and different--a book that revels in the most fundamental aspects of exploring the physical sciences.

Sacks was fortunate to be born into a family heavily composed of scientists: physicians, chemists, physicists, and metallurgists, like his "Uncle Tungsten." Both of his parents were physicians and indulged his curiousities by allowing him to set up his own lab in their house, where he familiarized himself with the history of chemistry by recreating many famous experiments and also trying many more of his own devising. Descriptions of his family life and his exploration into science are filled with wonder and with love for the world we live in.

Uncle Tungsten is a book to relish--written in everyday language, not in stuffy scientific terms--a book filled with the joy of youth, the fascination of discovery, and the wonderment of life. I would recommend it to anyone interested in science and nature, to anyone trying to understand those around them who love science so much, and to anyone in junior high or high school who wonders why they have to study chemistry!

It is always a joy to read Dr. Sacks. He is a sensitive, honest, and caring author. His other books (with the exception of "A Leg to Stand On") are all reports of his interactions with people exceptional neurological conditions. In "Uncle Tungsten," Dr. Sacks writes about his own past.

Sacks is a truly gifted writer. Some of his pieces in the past have stunned me with their beauty. That said, he has never created a fuller, more compelling portrait than the depiction he gives of his mother here. What a special woman she must have been. He clearly loves her still. This book is as much of a love story as it is a history.

Sack's recollections are laced through with his early encounters with science in its many forms. He speaks lovingly of his interactions with Chemistry. The education his mother provided him in anatomy also looms large in the images of his early years.

While I have always been a fan of Sacks because of his insights into the human condition, I can see the special appeal this book would have to those who have a love for science (my wife loves biology). Sacks writes of it with passion and awe. It was interesting for me, and I've never been much of a fan of science.

I recommend this book.

Oliver Sacks' memoir is shining, enlivened by curiosity, filled with joy. He has recaptured the boy he was, and "Uncle Tungsten" lets us experience the world as that boy knew it. My husband is a cloud physicist, and reading this book helped me see how he became entranced by science, by the wonders of the physical world, metamorphosing even as we look upon it.

Born in l933, well before television cartoons and video games, Sacks was left to his own devices. His broad intelligence led him down many roads, and his tolerant parents indulged his love for explorations in chemistry. During WW II, when he was six years old, he was evacuated from London home to a country boarding school, where the headmaster inflicted physical and emotional abuse upon his young charges. The trauma Sack underwent there, in addition to the horrors visited upon England by the war, caused him to lose faith in the omnipotent God of his Jewish tradition. His new faith became science, and he brought to it all the passion and dedication of his orthodox forebears.

In adolescence, sadly, he lost this flaming enthusiam, much as many teenagers "lose their faith"; and he turned to the conventional medical career his parents envisioned for him. Now, in late mid-life, his spiritual journey has brought him full circle to his early love again. His joy in scientific enquiry will ignite a similar joy in the reader.

There are some surprises here: first of all, I honestly thought Sacks is a normal American, probably family immigrated from Eastern Europe in the early 20th century. No, he grew up in London as the youngest boy in a huge family of Jewish scientists, physicians, and industrialists. 100 cousins! Some family branches in South Africa, Palestine, Germany and elsewhere.
Also, I expected a normal autobiography, despite the ominous subtitle 'memories of a chemical boyhood'. I thought I would find out how the man got where he was to be much later. No, we don't. We only learn about his first 14 years. And we learn a lot about the history of chemistry, probably more than most readers would have opted for.
But we also learn the following:
A boy grows up in a huge house in London with a huge family, everything is paradise, there is emotion (from Ma) and stimulation (from all) and whatever a little boy needs.
Then there is WW2 and the boy and his elder brother get evacuated to a boarding school, which is the prototype of all horrors. Bullying drives the brother into paranoia and the hero into closing the shutters with science and chemistry inside and the rest of the world outside.
He is liberated after 4 years and moves back home, but things are not what they were. He remains in his insulation. He ignores the events of the world. Politics incl. Zionism is bullying. He dislikes the punitive God of the orthodox. He is only a chemist.
With puberty and the end of WW2 the infatuation ends, or rather goes subterranean/subcutanean. Sacks learns new things, among others he discovers marine biology, and he reads Cannery Row, which makes him long for America. (previous mentioning of literature is sparse, there is some interest in Wells' science fiction, and there is a fascination with 1984, but that is obviously ahead of itself)
I give it only 4 stars, because I do not like chemistry quite as much (as I worked for a chemical company for 20 years.)

Once in 10th grade, I fell onto the floor in chemistry class after falling asleep in my chair. In other words, I have the scientific bent of wallpaper. Oliver Sacks' marvelous explanations and anecdotes about the development of chemistry would have kept me awake. About 65% of the book is composed of such material. It is fascinating (with a few exceptions)and I found myself understanding more science in these 300 or so pages than I picked up in all of high school.

Into this mix, Dr. Sacks seamlessly weaves stories of his own childhood. To me, these stories were the highlights of the book. Especially riveting are the stories of his "exile" to boarding school, sent away from London for his own safety at the height of WWII and, even better, his stories about his boyhood obsession with chemistry. As a child, he created everything from flaming compounds to noxious clouds which sent him fleeing outside and which filled his parents' home with toxic gases. Then, there's the highly entertaining exploding cuttlefish incident which rendered a friend's home uninhabitable for months. And I never grew tired of reading about his parents. Both renowned physicians, they were amazingly tolerant of their son's explosions and "stinkogens," but could be surprisingly obtuse when it came to his emotions. One such incident which totally took me aback was his mother's arranging for him to perform an autopsy at age 14 (to his great and understandable dismay).

You'll meet more of this eclectic family -- uncles who were metals experts and pioneers in their fields, an aunt who -- appearing perfect to the outside world -- was wont to blow her nose on the tablecloth in the privacy of her home and many other memorable characters. Perhaps it's just my preference, but I would have preferred more of these stories and a bit less science, even though the pure science part was enlightening, if a bit dry at times. (If you like the human interest angle, as I do, Sacks includes many fascinating and well-written portraits of historic scientific personalities.)

One question I always have is: to buy or to borrow. I borrowed this book from the library, but I wish I'd bought it. I ended up taking copious notes on the science parts, hoping to be able to refer back to this new education and also copying down many of the marvelous family stories so I could continue to enjoy Dr. Sacks' lively choice of words. One of the few times I regret the decision not to buy.

There are several authors that occupy the front of my reading list and Oliver Sacks is one of these. I have never been disappointed by anything he has written and I have seen his writing style change and grow into something truly wonderful. This book is no exception. It is an exceptional author who communicates not only his thoughts, words and ideas, but his voice as well. I heard an interview with Dr. Sacks several years ago and while reading Uncle Tungsten, I kept hearing this very careful and precise English accent, which added to the wonder of this exceptional book.

Dr. Sacks carefully weaves the history of his family and his own experiences growing up after World War II, with his fascination with the world around him and the history of chemistry. The product is one of the best science histories I have yet to read.

I wrestled with chemistry in high school. I finally gave up. If I had Dr. Sack's book, the outcome would have been different.

A report card from his early years predicted, "Sacks will go far, if he does not go too far." There need have been no worry, as it turns out. Oliver Sacks has published wonderful stories of his interactions with his neurological patients, like _Awakenings_ and _The Man Who Mistook His Wife for His Hat_, combining scientific teaching with history and with a sincere humanity. But there were times when the young Oliver went too far, and they are included in his fine memoir of his early years, _Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood_. It is a lovable account of a curious boy and his eccentric relatives who had professions in various scientific fields or dabbled in them, and a personal history of discovering chemistry from alchemy to quanta Anyone who has admired Sacks's previous work will find his latest one endearing and instructive.

Sacks was born in 1933 in London. Both his parents were practicing physicians, and took him on house calls. There was an atmosphere that encouraged interest in books, theater, and music, but mostly in science. His Uncle Dave ran a company that made lightbulbs, and his admiration for and expertise in the tungsten which made the filaments made him known as Uncle Tungsten within the family. Many of us had chemistry sets when we were growing up (and one of his chapters is "Stinks and Bangs"), but Sacks seems to have grown up inside one. He was sent away from bomb-targeted London during the Blitz to a school in the midlands, a removal that scarred him in many ways. When he returned, he began to do his own experiments in his laboratory (formerly a laundry room). When the Science Museum opened again after the war, he had a religious vision when viewing its wall-sized periodic table; a two page reproduction of the table is within this book, an illustration of just how much chemistry, as well as memoir, that the book contains. It also has capsule biographies of the chemists through history of whom young Oliver became a fan (not for him movie stars or footballers).

It is extremely strange that in a final chapter, "The End of the Affair," Sacks tells of Oliver's turn away from chemistry. To be sure, he had at an very young age mastered much of the field, but gradually at age 14 he began to turn away from it. The uncertainty and acausality of quantum mechanics played a role, for he realized he was not stirred by the new chemistry as he was the historic version he had pursued. His parents, loving and encouraging but not always understanding, started to show displeasure at his chemical expositions and influenced him more toward medicine. (A demonstration of misguided influence is that his mother brought him home malformed fetuses to dissect, a task which disgusted him: "She never perceived, I think, how distressed I became and probably imagined that I was as enthusiastic here as she was.") Beautifully written, _Uncle Tungsten_ gives us plenty of chemistry, but also a fascinating portrait of an unusual family. Sacks's loving understanding and sympathy for the young Oliver and his unusual upbringing has resulted in a yet another case study, just as humane as those of the other human specimens he has treated before, and deeply personal.

From sodium to radium to quantum mechanics, this basically autobiographical book tells the story of not only Oliver Sacks life between the ages of basically 4 and 15, but also tells the story of his discovery of the world of Chemistry and Physics and of what the world is composed.

Sacks starts by describing his life as almost a nightmare of incompassion. Living in wartorn London during the Second World War, his school life was filled with horror and pain. But the young Sacks retreated mentally into a world of mathematics, chemistry and physics. From Fibonacci mathematical series to the history of the building of the periodic chart of the elements, Sacks describes not only the discoveries of chemists from Newton through Nils Bohr, but also his incredible empirical chemical experiments. He reveals some basic chemical facts, known truly only to real chemists, despite what basic chemistry one might have had in school, his revelations are truly breathtaking and amazing in some cases.

And as he describes his experiences with life and chemistry, he also tells of the uncertainty that is generated by the search for certainty and stability. While never actually mentioning it by name, he does reference Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which says that one can know either the velocity or the position of an electron orbiting a atomic nucleus, but one can never know both simultaneously. In many ways it was this uncertainty and Einstein's theory of relativity, that in effect says that everything is relative to your particular frame of reference, that made Sacks progress from his fascination with science and mathematics into a new real world of Biology and Medicine. But, although the discoveries of the great physicists of the 1920's introduced tremendous uncertainty, that is, matter is both a particle and a wave, electrons are never totally predictable and radioactive substances deteriorate at a precise rate, whose half life can be specifically determined, but that precision does nothing to predict exactly the fate of any specific atom. Each atom's existence is determined virtually by chance in a radioactive substance and each can last for a fraction of a second or for 100 million years, until the event that causes it to finally deteriorate actually occurs. Those selfsame discoveries do in fact, lend stability to life in their instability.

Forever after, Sacks would be influenced in his life by those early experiments and discoveries, as well as what he learned by reading about the discoveries of others. And, even to this day, he still sees the world in terms of those early concepts of chemistry, which so infused his boyhood with meaning and substance. A tremendous work, recommended to anyone who has a curious mind and a yearning for finding the meaning of existence.

If you would like to know more about the childhood of the gentle soul who wrote "Awakenings," or the caring physician who wrote "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat", then this book will not disappoint.

I would also highly recommend this book to youth who would like to learn a lot more about chemistry in a form rich in images and history and devoid of any formulas, equations, or end of chapter homework questions.

Oliver Sacks provides a fascinating glimpse into a life and time far removed from our own "warning label" oriented society. While many have written about their war-time childhood in and around London, few can write with Sack's humor and grace. Fewer still can claim such a science/service oriented family.

The title, "Uncle Tungsten" first jumped out at me because I named my own child after the elements: Molybdenum (Molly) and plan to name the one on the way Wolfram - also known as the element Tungsten. Together with my wife, they are the light of my life.

However, Sacks offers the reader far more than a delightful set of his own characters. He provides a broad history of chemistry. This history picks up at the tail end of alchemy and advances in modest detail through to the beginnings of the nuclear and quantum age. As with Sack's prior non-fiction, one need not feel intimidated by the science. He focuses as much on biography as he does on his love for chemistry. With only a vague recollection of high school chemistry, I had no trouble following his threads.

While generally mild mannered, Sacks does offer several surprises. Without spoiling his work, these include noting the availability of some rather extraordinarily toxic chemicals over the counter - sold even to children (should they care to ask), the tragic, traumatic, and gory death of a beloved aunt, as well as his introduction to dissection and human anatomy via the corpse of a fourteen year old girl, a girl his own age.

It's a fun, touching, and interesting read.