I am such a book feign. seriously 1000+ ( I know it has to be more close to 2000 by now) and I can’t say NO when I see a decent one at the thrift shop, or even more so for review! One of these days i’m gonna have to either have a massive cleanout, our start my own library. Seriously I have so many books I can’t keep them at my & david’s. No, 95% are at mom’s!
I have books on everything under the sun, from childrens books (for that child that i want to have one day!) to books I read as a teenager,etc.
The most recent book that i had the chance to review is The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean. It took me a little while to exactly decide if it was my cup of tea to review. I’m more into romances, and teenagey books like Pretty Little Liars and things of that nature.
This book is more of an informational book, which is something I hardly ever go for, because i’m just one of those people who felt like i got enough of that when i was in school (high school and all ..ahum 7 years of college lol)
I however do like history, so I kind of make that my exception.(and english lol) This book was like chemistry with a combination of history dashed into it, so therefore, I found it easy to read.
I never did well with chemistry. There were too many formulas and too much math involved and when I got to the withdrawal date I bailed. You would have too, if you made a 31 on your midterm!(In my defense we had a few snow days and many of us thought that she said that if we ended up with the snow days it would be postponed)
Maybe if I’d have had this book, it would have made me more interested in the long run. One of the things that I really liked from the begining was the idea that the periodic table,when you strip all the #’s and text of of it, that it looks in a sorta kind of way like a castle that hasn’t been finished being built.
If you like chemistry or even just history and want to learn more about that crazy chart that you have probably saw a million times in your life, this would be the book to go to. It reads easy for an infomational book, and your sure to find some interesting tidbits!
For a better description I will leave you with the publishers summary and a link to the publishers page about the book 🙂
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.
