Slashdot Mirror
Uncle Tungsten
Oliver Sacks is a noted neurologist, and author of a number of books for popular audiences, including The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat. I came across Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood while browsing through a bookstore a few months ago, and decided to give it a read.
Uncle Tungsten is billed as "Memories of a Chemical Boyhood" in the title, but it's actually far more than a simple biography of his childhood. The real focus of the book is trifold: the influence of chemistry upon his early life and his early chemistry experiments and researches into chemistry, the stories behind the discoveries of the elements comprising the periodic table and of the discovery of the periodic table itself, and the non-chemical aspects of his childhood.
We learn early on that Sacks' family was chock-full of chemists (the title of the book refers to an uncle whose factory produced light bulbs using tungsten filaments), physicists, and doctors (including both of his parents). As a result, he had access to volumes of information about chemistry and access to chemicals of every sort, not to mention a family that was quite happy to indulge his interests. He made good use of these resources, ultimately gaining his own chemistry lab at home (complete with fume cupboard) where he experimented with a little of everything in an attempt to find out as much as possible about the chemical world.
His stories about how various elements had been isolated are given color by his own experiences with these same elements as a child. When he reaches the radioactive elements, for example, he illustrates some of the properties of uranium by describing his experiments with a chunk of uranium ore given to him by one of his uncles! Other experiments include dropping sodium (which is highly reactive with water) into a pond in a nearby park to watch it burn, bleaching red roses by holding them over burning sulphur, and using a spectroscope to examine the absorption Sacks' childhood experiments, however, are only part of the picture. Tales of his childhood are frequently interrupted by stories about the pioneers of chemistry (such as the Curies, Mendeleev, and Humphry Davy) who identified and isolated the various elements. As he discusses the discoveries of the elements, he includes descriptions of those researchers who ferreted out these elements, the puzzles they encountered during their work, and the hazards they faced when working with dangerous substances.
The book does include "non-chemical memories," too. Although chemistry was his first love, Sacks got the opportunity (and, with physician parents, the encouragement) to dissect worms, octopi, and even human cadavers! He also shares his wartime memories of growing up as a child during the blitz and being sent away from home to live in a boarding school for his own safety, although he ultimately returned home before the war was over. Often, however, the non-chemical memories are offered as background for the rest of the story.
I enjoyed this book very much, even though the extent of my chemistry background consists of getting a "C-" in high-school chemistry. My father, a design engineer who worked for many years in a chemical engineering department at a university, also enjoyed it. Based on these two opinions, at least, I can conclude that the book probably would appeal to a fairly wide geek-audience.
More can be discovered about the author at www.oliversacks.com
You can purchase Uncle Tungsten from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
I was given this book at Xmas, and couldn't put it down. Made me quite unpopular, but really worth it........
Maths (in my opinion) is a science - the science of numbers. However, it could be debated whether or not this makes it a "true" science.
I dont know that it is overprotective so much as overlitigious. I remember the chemistry set I got as a kid. The regeants were little plastic containers with strips of paper, to which you added distilled water. You used little plastic pipettes to transfer a miniscule amount of chemical to the little "test tube tray" that came with it. Let the good times begin! This was about 10 years ago I imagine.
The real fun started when I inherited my uncle's chemistry set. Glass test tubes! Real chemicals! Nitrocellulose here I come!
As a chemist I enjoyed this book and cursed Sacks for having the opportunities in childhood that I never had :) He grew up in a time of scienfific learning that will never be repeated.
Interestingly he mentions in the book how he lost interest in Chemistry at a certain point. That happens to be one of the points that most undergrads start freaking out and looking for a different major. LOL.
Readers may, like me, start skipping over the parts of the book where Sacks starts wandering away from science and into personal topics. Do we really need to know how his first orgasm came about?
Amen to that! I was able to raid some university store-rooms for chemicals and so had lots of chemisty-set fun growing up even in the 80s, but it just keeps getting harder and harder. It's nigh impossible for kids to get dangerous chemicals today, and our society is poorer for it. It's not that hard if they've got access to an adult. I work for a chemical company, and I've bought stuff from VW&R, Fisher, etc. without any questions as to whether or not my company was actually a company. Thanks to credit cards and on-line ordering, you can get almost anything. True, you'd probably have a hard time getting your hands on large volumes of truly dangerous stuff (you know, like fluorine gas), but you could easily get most of the chemicals you could find in old kits. Uh, BTW, if anyone reports this to Uncle Ashcroft for potential terrorist activity, my name's George and I live at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
-- Fugacity: Confusing chemists since 1908
Sex is the foundation of knowledge. If not for the desire to mate, we humans wouldn't have a drive to improve ourselves and the lives of our offspring.
Just watch. Take mating out of the picture, and see how few years it takes for advancement to grind to a halt for lack of grinding.
University store rooms (at least the lab based ones) often have fairly interesting and obscure things in them. Have been around for a few clearings out of lab chem stocks and there's alway sat least one event of: "2kg of XXX! Didn't they outlaw that like 15 years ago..." "Maybe and this is about 20 years old". This is why Gen. Chem. profs will mention to examine old bottles labeled 'ether' without touching them (or speaking loudly around them) even when precious few students will ever run into one of these items, they are found periodically.
I received this book for Christmas last year. I found it very interesting, albeit slightly slow.
One of the things that made the book enjoyable was that Sacks is an excellent writer: He is able to hold his own in both fiction and non-fiction, as scientists often tend to.
Uncle Tungsten gets top marks, especially for an autobiography, which I usually find godawful.
...Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.
Churchill