2nd of 3 - Book Reviews

Here's number 2 of the 3 book reviews I'd like to get done this weekend:

The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements by Sam Kean, Narrated by Sean Runnette, Publisher: Tantor Media; Unabridged,MP3 - Unabridged CD edition (August 24, 2010), ISBN-10: 9781400169528

Source: Where I get all my audio books - our wonderful local public library!

Rating: 4 of 5 STARS

This is simply a very, very interesting book. But here this is coming from a person who truly remembers the instant she fell in love with atoms in sophomore chemistry class and who went on to get a degree in chemical engineering. So I could be biased and the "normal" person (a group I sometimes include myself but not often) might find it dull and hard to follow. It's hard for me to tell. Also, since I listened to this book instead of reading it, I tended to get lost in all the techno-language of orbitals and quantum mechanics and radioactive decay and spent a good deal of time backing up to relisten to sections. Or either just admitting I wasn't following along and zone out until something intriguing (and less difficult to understand) caught my attention. Hence the 4 instead of 5 rating. But that could just be a fault of my personal brain and not the reading public in general.

The Disappearing Spoon is chock-full of fascinating stories about the scientists involved in constructing the periodic table. I've gotten tons of ideas for tangential short stories I hope I eventually follow through with and put pen to paper. Stories of Robert Oppenheimer, Tycho Brahe, and Louis Pasteur to just name a few.

Minus a few sluggish areas, this book is well worth the listen! And actually, I'm not sure I would have made it through the book in print. Narrator Sean Runnette does a fabulous job. His voice is very expressive without being annoying and carried me along from disc to disc whereas if I were reading The Spoon it very easily could have been one of those books that I might have been tempted to put down for a while and never gotten back around to.