For me, knowing how a science developed often seems like the best way to understand its basic ideas. Sight unseen, this book sounded like my best bet for a history of chemistry. Not a chemist myself, but the son of one with private labs in our basement, I took a year of chem in high school long ago and in recent years have read a fair amount of bio-science that naturally visits chemical knowledge. So I'm a little familiar with the basics, and I thought maybe learning how modern chemistry came to be would give me a similar understanding to the one I got of calculus (which I also studied in college) by learning what practical problems Newton was trying to solve (like how high to aim a cannon ball) when he invented calculus and added it to algebra.
Unfortunately, this book does a poor job of describing what the early modern chemists were actually doing as they tried to figure out that there might be more than one kind of "air", which seems to have been the key to realizing both that matter is comprised of many different elements and that matter is atomic. I imagine other chemists can visualize what the groping scientists were actually doing; but oftentimes I couldn't. Although every intro chemistry textbook is loaded with sketches and diagrams, this book has almost none besides historical faces. If you don't already know what simple chemical lab equipment looks like (my wife had no idea what a "retort" is, though I happen to know because of my upbringing), this book won't tell you, and you won't be able to figure out how these guys were managing to do things like separate one invisible gas ("air") from another. (There is an image of the all-important Periodic Table, but you may not notice it at first; it's printed on the inside back cover of the paperback edition.)
The book is poorly prepared as history as well. Its summaries of what was going on at certain times in broader world history are often glib and sometimes--to my mind--suspect. More certainly, the text is capricious about where an actual date (year) is stated for when a certain scientist was doing his or her work. Often it proceeds through general periods of time, sometimes describing scientists' contribution without ever actually say when those scientists lived or worked. Inasmuch as there are important questions of who else's work they were building on, these omissions are annoying at best.
I've hesitated above to lay these problems at the feet of the authors. Some of them surely should have been spotted resolved by the editors at Perseus. But then, there are obvious typos here and there in the book, so maybe there was little editing. Too bad.
All in all, I suspect one might get at least as good a history of chemistry for non-chemists by browsing it on Wiki.
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