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Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, Oliver Sacks (This is a fascinating story of Oliver Sacks as a young boy living in the 1930s and 40s in London. Brian Greene: "Oliver Sacks weaves together the wonders of chemistry and his boyhood experiences with grace, ease, and just the right comedic touch.") |
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The Periodic Table, Primo Levi (Levi was a celebrated Italian author and chemist and the story is a mixture of his family history, being Jewish and chemistry with each chapter being named for an element. The most gripping chapters deal with life under a fascist government including the Nazis.) |
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The 13th Element. The
Sordid Tale of Murder, Fire, and Phosphorus,
John Emsley (This
is the story of one element, from its discovery and its
remarkable
properties down through its commercialization in
matches. Most of
the book deals with the latter where matchmakers in a
Dickens-era
England worked for starvation wages while losing their
health due to
diseases such as phossy-jaw caused by exposure to
phosphorus. If you
ever wondered why we have industrial health and safety
laws, this book
will answer that question.) |
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Oxygen, Roald Hoffman and Carl Djerasi (This is a screenplay that addresses taking credit for the discovery of oxygen. Was it Carl Scheele who was actually the first to discover it and describe its properties, or was it Joseph Priestley who discovered it second but published his results three years before Scheele (1774 vs 1777) or was it Antoine Lavoisier who didn't discover it at all, but rather took the results of Scheele and Priestley and was the first to correctly interpret them?) |
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Mauve. How one man
invented a color that changed the world, Simon
Garfield (The
title tells only part of the story. The production
and marketing
of this one chemical ignited an interest in industrial
production of
chemicals, including research and development.) |
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Chemistry Imagined:
Reflections on Science, Roald Hoffmann and
Vivian Torrence (This
book blends chemistry with art, poetry. Each
chapter is
free-standing and the chapter titles give a flavor of
the books
contents: Radium, The Periodic Table, Amazing Growth,
Energy and Form,
Greek Air, Simply Burning, The Philosopher's Stone,
Phlogiston, Blood
Counts, The Grail, Patterns, Seeing to the Center of
Things, and a
dozen more! This is a very fun book that is
relevent in a way
similar to the interlude chapters in our text book.) |
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The Same and Not the Same, Roald Hoffman (Hoffman is a most gifted popular science writer (and Nobel prize winner in chemistry.) In this book, he addresses enantiomers (mirror image molecules) and the trouble they can cause — for example, Thalidomide: one enantiomer was an effective sedative prescribed to pregnant women and the other enantiomer, supposedly removed from product, caused serious birth defects, especially missing limbs. In his usual style, he blends science, ethics, and values for a thought-provokingly good book with lots of terrific colored pictures.) |
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Periodic Tales – A Cultural history of the elements, Aldersey-Williams “Hugh Andersey-Williams offers readers a captivating look at the elements—and the amazing, little-known stories behind their discoveries. Periodic Tales is an energetic and wide-ranging book of innovations and innovators, of superstition and science and the myriad ways the chemical elements are woven into our culture, history, and language.” |
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The Disappearing Spoon, Sam Kean “The Periodic Table is a crowning scientific achievement, but it's also a treasure trove of adventure, betrayal, and obsession. These fascinating tales follow every element on the table as they play out their parts in human history, and in the lives of the (frequently) mad scientists who discovered them.” |
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Lavoisier in the Year One, Madison Bell (Antoine Lavoisier was one of the greatest minds of science; he unraveled the experimental results of Joseph Priestley and others and provided an explanation of the facts that we still use today. He has been called “the father of modern chemistry.” The “year one” reference in the title refers to the French revolution in which the calendar was reset to One.) |
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A
Short History of Chemistry, 3rd ed.,
J. R. Partington (J. R. Partington wrote a large number
of books dating
back to the 1920s! His first edition of History of
Chemistry
appeared
in 1937. Partington was a scholar of chemical
history and this
book is
excellent. |
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The
History of Chemistry,
John Hudson (This is a fairly typical history of
chemistry book.
It is
inexpensive and relatively thin so it gives a concise
oversight to the
subject. It also has a number of pictures to
augment the
text. There
are many books on the history of chemistry, but this one
is still in
print. Some really good chemistry history books
were written in
the
early 20th Century and are probably available in your
local library.) |
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A Chemical History
Tour: Picturing Chemistry from Alchemy to Modern
Molecular Science, Arthur Greenberg (This is a "coffee table book" with lots of pictures of pre-20th Century European chemistry labs and apparatuses.) |
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Lavoisier: Chemist,
Biologist, Economist, Jean-Pierre
Poirier
and
Rebecca
Balinski (This is a thorough historical account of
Lavoisier's life and includes all aspects of his life
including his
work with the tax agencies, building a fence around
Paris, work with
the metric system, and most importantly, his scientific
work. Lavoisier in the Year
One (listed earlier) is a much simpler book to
read, but this
one is truly excellent.) |
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Serendipity: Accidental
Discoveries in Science, Royston
Roberts (36 "accidental discoveries" that have changed
the world, from
the discovery of quinine, smallpox vaccine, anesthetics,
the basis of
organic chemistry, synthetic rubber, chirality, fabrics
such as nylon,
insulin, X-rays, safety glass, penicillin, teflon, and
many more
interesting stories, most of which have their basis in
chemistry. |
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The Age of Wonder: The Romantic Generation and the Discovery of the Beauty and Terror of Science, Richard Holmes. Meet Joseph Banks in Paradise, Herschel on the Moon, Davy on the Gas, Dr Frankenstein and the Soul, and... several other key figures in the English Enlightenment. Utterly absorbing account of 18th and early 19th century English science leading up to the Romantic Age of Science. |
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The Measure of All Things, Ken Alder (development of the metric system during the late 18th century and early 19th century in France) |
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The Fly in the Cathedral, Brian Cathcart (This is the remarkable historical account of Rutherford and the discovery of the nature of the nucleus.) * |
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The Map that Changed
the World. Willian Smith and the Birth of Modern
Geology, Simon
Winchester (This is an account of how one man spent 22
years unraveling
the unseen geological make-up of England, making it
possible to create
a map of the underside of England.) From this
accomplishment he went on
to debtors prison for ten years. The story has a
happy ending,
however. |
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The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World, Jenny Uglow (In 1760s Birmingham, England, a group of scientist/engineer/experimentalists met near the full moon of each month to enjoy an evening of intellectual exchange. The group consisted of Michael Boulton (manufacturing of toys and buttons, James Watt (steam engine), Josiah Wedgwood (pottery), Erasmus Darwin (inventor, early evolution theorist and grandfather of Charles Darwin), and Joseph Priestley (religious nonconformist, experimental genius and discoverer of oxygen).) |
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Connections,
James Burke (This fascinating book describes how
coincidental
connections between events and individuals triggered
scientific and
technological discoveries.) |
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Longitude:
The
True
Story
of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific
Problem of his Time, Dava Sobel (John Harrison
spent 40 years
perfecting a clock that would not gain/lose time at sea
for the purpose
of navigation. His biggest challenge was
convincing the board
that was offering a prize for such a device that he
actually had the
best clock. His clocks were confiscated,
accidentally destroyed
and dismissed for reasons that were very often
political.
Finally, King George III intervened and Harrison was
awarded the prize.) |
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Galileo's Daughter, Dava Sobel (This historical memoir contains content from the 124 surviving letters written by Galileo's daughter. Because she was a sequestered nun, the two seldom met face-to-face, buth, nevertheless maintained a loving relationship through letters smuggled out of the convent. Sobel is a master story-teller and this one is quite hard to put down.) * |
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Science
and Change 1500 - 1700, Hugh Kearney. These
two centuries
were pivotal in the development of science.
Copernicus, Kepler,
Galileo, Descartes, Pascal and others all contributed to
the
development of "modern" science. All this took
place in an era
when Aristotle's explanation of how the world works was
enjoying 1500+
years of being deemed the truth. The work of these
individuals
also challenged traditional religious views and the
relationship
between science and religion was often
contentious. |
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Napoleon's Buttons. How Seventeen Molecules Changed History, Penny LeCouteur and Jay Burreson. Seventeen individual stories. Fascinating! |
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Journey of the Universe, Brian Swimme & Mary Tucker, “Today we know what no previous generation knew: the history of the universe and of the unfolding of life on Earth. Through the astonishing combined achievements of natural scientists worldwide, we now have a detailed account of how galaxies and stars, planets and living organisms, human beings and human consciousness came to be.” |
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Cathedrals of Science, Patrick Coffey, “Coffey describes how chemistry got its modern footing – how thirteen brilliant men and one woman struggled with the laws of the universe and with each other. They wanted to discover how the world worked, but they also wanted credit for making those discoveries, and their personalities often affected how that credit was assigned.” |
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The Microbe Hunters, Paul de Kruif, “Microbe Hunters is a timeless dramatization of the scientists, bacteriologists, doctors, and medical technicians who discovered microbes and invented the vaccines to counter them.” |
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Faraday, Maxwell and the Electromagnetic Field, Forbes & Mahon, “Two of the boldest and most creative scientists of all time were Michael Faraday (1791-1867) and James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879). This is the story of how these two men - separated in age by forty years - discovered the existence of the electromagnetic field and devised a radically new theory which overturned the strictly mechanical view of the world that had prevailed since Newton's time.” |
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A More Perfect Heaven, Dava Sobel, “By 1514, the reclusive cleric Nicolaus Copernicus had written and hand-copied an initial outline of his heliocentric theory... Over the next two decades, Copernicus expanded his theory through hundreds of observations, while compiling in secret a book-length manuscript that tantalized mathematicians and scientists throughout Europe. For fear of ridicule, he refused to publish.” |
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Galileo’s Finger. The 10 Great Ideas of Science, Peter Atkin, “Galileo's Finger takes the reader on an extraordinary journey that embraces the ten central ideas of current science… Atkins leads the reader to an understanding of the essence of the whole of science, from evolution and the emergence of complexity, to entropy, the spring of all change in the universe; from energy… to symmetry; and from cosmology, the globalization of reality, to spacetime, the arena of all action.” |
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Origin of Species, Charles Darwin, “Few other books have created such a lasting storm of controversy as The Origin of Species. Darwin’s theory that species derive from other species by a gradual evolutionary process and that the average level of each species is heightened by the “survival of the fittest” stirred up popular debate to fever pitch. Its acceptance revolutionized the course of science.” |
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Splendid Solution, Jonas Salk and the Conquest of Polio, Jeffrey Kluger (The true story of the remarkable search for a solution to the polio epidemic of the early and mid-20th century.)* |
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The End of Poverty:
Economic Possibilities for Our Time, Jeffrey
Sachs (In the first
part of this book, Sachs reviews the economic
development that has or
has not taken place in the third world. He offers
explanations
for each case. In the second half of the book, he
addresses the
challenges set by the UN's Millennium Development Goals
for ending
extreme poverty in the world. (Thanks to Dr. Gary
Michels for
recommending this book.) |
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Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin (Mortenson has dedicated his life to helping villages in Afghanistan and Pakistan build schools and to encourage girls to go to school. This is a very inspiring book.) (Thanks to Dr. Barbara Zust (Gustavus Adolphus College) for recommending this book.) |
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Guns, Germs and Steel,
Jsred
Diamond.
The
author reviews the history of humans, continent by
continent and island by island down through the
ages. Read how
resources and circumstances come in to play in directing
our evolvement
as a species. |
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Collapse, Jared Diamond, “In Jared Diamond’s follow-up to the Pulitzer-Prize winning Guns, Germs and Steel, the author explores how climate change, the population explosion and political discord create the conditions for the collapse of civilization” |
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The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert, “Over the last half a billion years, there have been five mass extinctions, when the diversity of life on earth suddenly and dramatically contracted. Scientists around the world are currently monitoring the sixth extinction, predicted to be the most devastating extinction event since the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. This time around, the cataclysm is us.” |
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The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan, “The Botany of Desire ingeniously demonstrates how people and domesticated plants have formed a similarly reciprocal relationship. Pollan masterfully links four fundamental human desires—sweetness, beauty, intoxication, and control—with the plants that satisfy them: the apple, the tulip, marijuana, and the potato. |
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1491, Charles Mann, “Pre-Columbian Indians were not sparsely settled in a pristine wilderness; rather, there were huge numbers of Indians who actively molded and influenced the land around them. The astonishing Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan had running water and immaculately clean streets, and was larger than any contemporary European city.” |
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A Rum Affair, A true account of botanical fraud, Karl Sabbagh (In the 1940s, a well-respected botanist John Heslop Harrison provided “evidence” that certain grasses survived the last ice age on the Isle of Rum. This is the story of how this fraudulent claim was unraveled.) |
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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lax, Rebecca Skloot, “Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor black tobacco farmer whose cells—taken without her knowledge in 1951—became one of the most important tools in medicine, vital for developing the polio vaccine, cloning, gene mapping, and more.” |
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Mean Genes, Terry Burnham and Jay Phelan (Our genetic makeup evolved for a much different world than we find ourselves in today. Food was scarce, enemies lurked, and life was short. Chapters include topics dedicated to debt, body fat, drugs, risk, greed, gender, beauty, infidelity, family, friends and foes.) (Thanks to Dr. James Platz (CU Biology) for recommending this book.) |
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Oxygen The Molecule
that made the World, Nick Lane. How did
Earth become a
planet with an oxygen atmosphere? How did life
begin? What
is the role of oxygen in life? This is a fairly
difficult but
very interesting book that assumes a knowledge of cell
biology and
biochemistry. |
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An Anthropologist on
Mars, Oliver
Sacks.
Seven
true
accounts from the noted clinical neurologist
Oliver Sacks. The chapter titles should coax this book
onto your
must-read list: The Case of the Colorblind Painter, The
Last Hippie, A
Surgeon's Life (about Tourette's syndrome), To See and
Not See (about
people that experience difficulty after regaining their
sight after
decades of blindness), The Landscape of His Dreams
(about a painter who
could recall and paint miniscule details about his
hometown after
decades of not seeing it), Prodigies, and An
Anthropologist on Mars
(about autism). |
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Planet of the Bugs, Scott Shaw, “Dinosaurs, however toothy, did not rule the earth—and neither do humans. But what were and are the true potentates of our planet? Insects, says Scott Richard Shaw—millions and millions of insect species. Starting in the shallow oceans of ancient Earth and ending in the far reaches of outer space…” |
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Decartes’ Bones, Russell Shorto, “Sixteen years after René Descartes' death in Stockholm in 1650, a pious French ambassador exhumed the remains of the controversial philosopher to transport them back to Paris. Thus began a 350-year saga that saw Descartes' bones traverse a continent, passing between kings, philosophers, poets, and painters.” |
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The Professor and the Madman, A tale of murder, insanity, and the making of the Oxford English Dictionary, Simon Winchester* |
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Rocks of Ages, Science
and Religion in
the Fullness of Life. Stephen Jay Gould.
Author/Philosopher/Essayist
Stephen Jay Gould addresses science and religion as the
two compatible
rocks in our lives. |
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Lab Girl, Hope Jahren, “Jahren has such a passion for the natural world that it's hard to imagine her in any role other than her current one; a professor of geobiology at the University of Hawaii. Lab Girl is her engaging new memoir, which tells the story of her fight to establish and fund her own research laboratory.” |
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The Naturalist, E. O. Wilson, “Wilson describes for the first time both his growth as a scientist and the evolution of the science he has helped define. He traces the trajectory of his life—from a childhood spent exploring the Gulf Coast of Alabama and Florida to life as a tenured professor at Harvard—detailing how his youthful fascination with nature blossomed into a lifelong calling.” |
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The Immense Journey, Loren Eiseley, “[Nebraska] anthropologist and naturalist Loren Eiseley blends scientific knowledge and imaginative vision in this story of man. (1957)” |
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Flight Behavior, Barbara Kingsolver, “Flight Behavior is a brilliant and suspenseful novel set in present day Appalachia; a breathtaking parable of catastrophe and denial that explores how the complexities we inevitably encounter in life lead us to believe in our particular chosen truths.” |