Chemistry Books

From his earliest days, Oliver Sacks, the distinguished neurologist who is also one of the most remarkable storytellers of our time, was irresistibly drawn to understanding the natural world. Born into a large family of doctors, metallurgists, chemists, physicists, and teachers, his curiosity was encouraged and abetted by aunts, uncles, parents, and older brothers. But soon after his sixth birthday, the Second World War broke out and he was evacuated from London, as were hundreds of thousands of children, to escape the bombing. Exiled to a school that rivaled Dickens's grimmest, fed on a steady diet of turnips and beetroots, tormented by a sadistic headmaster, and allowed home only once in four years, he felt desolate and abandoned.

Have you ever wondered about the differences between liquids, gases, and solids? Or what actually happens when something burns? What exactly is a solution? An acid? A base? This is chemistry--the composition and structure of substances composing all matter, and how they can be transformed. Whether you are studying chemistry for the first time on your own, want to refresh your memory for a test, or need a little help for a course, this concise, interactive guide gives you a fresh approach to this fascinating subject.

In this elegant, erudite but entertaining book, Paul Strathern, the award-winning novelist and expositor of complex ideas, unravels the dramatic history of chemistry through the quest for the elements. Framing this history is the life-story of the nineteenth-century Russian Scientist Dmitri Mendeleyev, who fell asleep at his desk and awoke after conceiving the Periodic Table in a dream - the template upon which modern chemistry is founded, and the formulation of which marked chemistry's coming of age as a science. From ancient philosophy, through medieval alchemy to the splitting of the atom, this is the true story of the birth of chemistry and the role of one man's dream.