Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood - Oliver Sacks

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Category: Autobiography. Acquired: Snoisle Library (looks funny if you don't capitalize the "i"). Read: June 2009 Briefly: memoirs of a young boy growing up in the 1920's and 30's, and learning the wonders of the molecular world around him.

Comments: This book begins "Many of my childhood memories are of metals", which gives you a pretty good clue where it's headed for the next 300-odd pages. Basically, it's a first-person account of a young boy who grew up in a household (and extended family) full of scientists, doctors and engineers. His fascination for metals is fueled by an uncle who happens to run a tungsten fabrication plant in town. The uncle's love for this particular metal is infectious, and he's more than willing to share his knowledge (and personal lab, and shelves of chemicals) with the 10-year old lad. (While the author acknowledges that he was given access to some outrageously dangerous substances - nasty acids, toxic gasses, even radioactive isotopes - he also decries how today's chemistry sets have been completely stripped of anything even remotely interesting). This becomes the launching point for a lifelong interest in materials ranging from inert gases to the rare earth elements.

The story is fascinating because it's not just the boy who is learning. This is roughly the same era when scientists were finally beginning to understand such fundamentals as the nature of the atom, how elements were arranged in the periodic table, how/why certain elements would combine, how to predict what their compounds would be like, etc. Sacks (the author) had studied the various elements enough to have a sense that there were some regularities involved (e.g. elements that were 8 numbers apart tended to have similar properties). So, when the periodic table was finally published in today's form, he describes it as a pivotal moment in his life, as it finally made sense out of so much that he had observed on his own.

So, this is the story of two journeys, both the author's and the science world in general. I enjoyed how Sacks intertwines the narratives so that the reader gets to experience the sense of achievement felt by both him individually and (presumably) those making the actual breakthroughs. And, the many anecdotes about growing up in this era add some human interest as well.

Final note - you'll understand and enjoy the book a lot more if you brush up on your high school chemistry first, reviewing such topics as atomic weight, atomic structure, oxidation/reduction, ionic bonding, classes of elements, etc. You know, just the basics.