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Book Review of The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements

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Most excellent book and again it proves how good our 20th C. high school education was. I never took Chemistry except as a 10th grader (aged 14-15) in 1961-1962 but found it easy to understand this volume until the last chapter or two (plasma, etc.) Out West we had good high school educations in the 20th Century....
The author does have some endnotes but it is not a scholarly book where you can follow a footnote to his source. As he said, Mr. Kean is sharing things commonly known among advanced Chemistry, Biology, and Astrophysics students.
The periodic table is full of interesting, unpredictable stories if you know where to look (and the author certainly does).
No wonder that there are a hundred wishes outstanding.
I could barely squeak out a B from Mr. Tracy, but I had a good lab partner. He wore a bow tie and would sometimes play on the organ to accompany an assembly program. He told us that he liked to stop at factories and obtain a tour to learn of their processes when on vacation. At the time, I wondered what Mrs. Tracy thought of such outings....