I have found a great book to start of a blog about science writing. The Disappearing Spoon is an enjoyable book that sends you on a roller coaster ride through the Periodic table. Author Sam Kean makes elements come alive with the personal stories of how they were discovered, and the individual properties that each element brings to the universe.
The love of learning that somehow gets lost in most high school classroom is not because the material is boring; far from it. What is forgotten is the importance that stories about the scientists themselves bring meaning to the search for knowledge and spark the interest in learning once more. In his own voice the author writes:
I stuck out five frigid years in Minnesota and ended up with an honors degree in physics, but despite spending hundreds of hours in labs, despite memorizing thousands of equations, despite drawing tens of thousands of diagrams with frictionless pulleys and ramps — my real education was in my professors’ stories.
The Disappearing Spoon is written in a way that sends the reader through elements both unheard of and familiar. I admit that after reading just a few chapters I was drawn into my kitchen wondering about the chemical reactions that are just waiting for me to experiment with.
Have you read it? What are your thoughts on this book?
