The Disappearing Spoon, Sam Kean (365 Books, Day 280)

Yesterday's review. My wrists are officially On Notice as this is not behavior a person should have to tolerate.

This is a collection of cool stories about elements. Kean has gone through the periodic table and fished out a lot of interesting anecdotes about the discoveries, uses, appearances, names, practical joke possibilities, and so on of every element currently on the table (and some hypothesized but not, as yet, produced).

Unfortunately, and it pains me to have to say this about a work so intimately concerned with one of the great feats of human data arrangement, this book is not very well organized. He's going through column by column, except when he isn't, and the chapters are thematic, except that I guess each is also supposed to focus on the group of elements listed at its head, some of which do not seem very thematic and consequently turn up a lot in chapters that aren't the ones they're listed in. He has neglected to notice that in a book intended for a popular audience it might be a good idea to spell out the names of the less common elements in those chapter-head listings in addition to using their two-letter abbreviations, especially since they aren't spelled out in the reference periodic table at the back either. And, since this is thematic/by element/whatever this is, various scientists and historical events pop in and out in an extraordinarily arbitrary fashion. I am not saying this is a badly written book, but it needed a more precise deep structure, because currently it is much more confusing than it really ought to be. If you have not heard of a particular scientist, for example, you are going to spend a lot of time staring at names wondering whether that was the same guy who was mentioned in passing in chapter five or whether they are merely similar and what century we are even discussing.

That said, these are some pretty awesome anecdotes. The title is referring to a lab practical joke, in which one casts teaspoons out of gallium, which melts at 84F and looks, you know, metallic, so then one hands around the spoons and watches them dissolve in everyone's tea. The book is full of little tidbits like the reason that the Washington Monument is topped with aluminum-- before the modern refining process, it was markedly more precious than gold. That sort of thing.

However, the book also suffers from what I would call a confusion of emphasis. I am, for instance, the sort of person who would like to know what happens if anyone accidentally drinks any of the gallium tea (is it toxic or what?), and who thought this up in the first place, and so on, in-text rather than with a source referred to in the notes (to be fair, the notes are thorough). Something of a lack of follow-through there.

And the coolest thing in the entire book gets about two and a half pages, a seriously kick-ass essay about the weirdest battle in WWI, which took place in a molybdenum mine in Colorado before the U.S. entered the war. The Germans had discovered that the extremely large guns which fired shells for miles would last longer if their steel was alloyed with molybdenum, a substance considered generally worthless before this discovery. The largest available supply of molybdenum had been refined by the Colorado mine's owner, using a process he invented himself, because he felt like it and was vaguely convinced he could find a use for it someday.

The principal thing I have to say about what happened next is: where's my action movie? Claim jumpers! People being thrown off cliffs into snowdrifts and surviving by sheer luck! A German company renaming itself American Steel for purposes of chicanery! Hand-to-hand fighting in mines, ignored by the law because the law thought the substance being fought over was basically a rock! Rock smuggling of unprecedented proportions!

Did I mention this was like two pages? If I had been intending to write a book, and I came across this material, I would have written a book about this. Instead, this book contains rather more than I consider necessary of the usual things about how Mendeleev was a genius bastard and Rutherford was basically God and also the Manhattan Project, which are stories I have encountered repeatedly elsewhere whereas I do not every day see WWI molybdenum claim-jumpers.

So I cannot disrecommend this book, because there is a lot of cool stuff in it, it is competent on a sentence level and within each anecdote, it is well-sourced, and it is mostly entertaining despite the confusions. It's just frustrating, and it could have been a great deal more than it turned out to be.

BECAUSE IT COULD HAVE BEEN A REALLY AWESOME ACTION MOVIE OR, OKAY, HISTORY BOOK NO ONE'S WRITTEN YET.

Sigh.

The Disappearing Spoon, Sam Kean (365 Books, Day 280)

Yesterday's review. My wrists are officially On Notice as this is not behavior a person should have to tolerate.

This is a collection of cool stories about elements. Kean has gone through the periodic table and fished out a lot of interesting anecdotes about the discoveries, uses, appearances, names, practical joke possibilities, and so on of every element currently on the table (and some hypothesized but not, as yet, produced).

Unfortunately, and it pains me to have to say this about a work so intimately concerned with one of the great feats of human data arrangement, this book is not very well organized. He's going through column by column, except when he isn't, and the chapters are thematic, except that I guess each is also supposed to focus on the group of elements listed at its head, some of which do not seem very thematic and consequently turn up a lot in chapters that aren't the ones they're listed in. He has neglected to notice that in a book intended for a popular audience it might be a good idea to spell out the names of the less common elements in those chapter-head listings in addition to using their two-letter abbreviations, especially since they aren't spelled out in the reference periodic table at the back either. And, since this is thematic/by element/whatever this is, various scientists and historical events pop in and out in an extraordinarily arbitrary fashion. I am not saying this is a badly written book, but it needed a more precise deep structure, because currently it is much more confusing than it really ought to be. If you have not heard of a particular scientist, for example, you are going to spend a lot of time staring at names wondering whether that was the same guy who was mentioned in passing in chapter five or whether they are merely similar and what century we are even discussing.

That said, these are some pretty awesome anecdotes. The title is referring to a lab practical joke, in which one casts teaspoons out of gallium, which melts at 84F and looks, you know, metallic, so then one hands around the spoons and watches them dissolve in everyone's tea. The book is full of little tidbits like the reason that the Washington Monument is topped with aluminum-- before the modern refining process, it was markedly more precious than gold. That sort of thing.

However, the book also suffers from what I would call a confusion of emphasis. I am, for instance, the sort of person who would like to know what happens if anyone accidentally drinks any of the gallium tea (is it toxic or what?), and who thought this up in the first place, and so on, in-text rather than with a source referred to in the notes (to be fair, the notes are thorough). Something of a lack of follow-through there.

And the coolest thing in the entire book gets about two and a half pages, a seriously kick-ass essay about the weirdest battle in WWI, which took place in a molybdenum mine in Colorado before the U.S. entered the war. The Germans had discovered that the extremely large guns which fired shells for miles would last longer if their steel was alloyed with molybdenum, a substance considered generally worthless before this discovery. The largest available supply of molybdenum had been refined by the Colorado mine's owner, using a process he invented himself, because he felt like it and was vaguely convinced he could find a use for it someday.

The principal thing I have to say about what happened next is: where's my action movie? Claim jumpers! People being thrown off cliffs into snowdrifts and surviving by sheer luck! A German company renaming itself American Steel for purposes of chicanery! Hand-to-hand fighting in mines, ignored by the law because the law thought the substance being fought over was basically a rock! Rock smuggling of unprecedented proportions!

Did I mention this was like two pages? If I had been intending to write a book, and I came across this material, I would have written a book about this. Instead, this book contains rather more than I consider necessary of the usual things about how Mendeleev was a genius bastard and Rutherford was basically God and also the Manhattan Project, which are stories I have encountered repeatedly elsewhere whereas I do not every day see WWI molybdenum claim-jumpers.

So I cannot disrecommend this book, because there is a lot of cool stuff in it, it is competent on a sentence level and within each anecdote, it is well-sourced, and it is mostly entertaining despite the confusions. It's just frustrating, and it could have been a great deal more than it turned out to be.

BECAUSE IT COULD HAVE BEEN A REALLY AWESOME ACTION MOVIE OR, OKAY, HISTORY BOOK NO ONE'S WRITTEN YET.

Sigh.

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Desperate Duchesses, Eloisa James (365 Books, Day 281)

Well that was better than I thought it would be.

The previous Eloisa James I read was a frothy confection of a thing, airy comedy of no particular time period with a penchant for slapstick. This one is quite firmly set in a Regency that is more historically accurate than most romance versions, and provides more depth than I was expecting.

For one thing, this may be the romance novel most focused on its side cast I have seen. And they're interesting. The heroine has come from the country and imposed herself on a distant cousin because she saw a man at a ball and fell in love with him; the cousin's brother is in love with her. All very usual. However, we get a lot of time devoted to the marital feud between the cousin and her husband, which is both funny and genuinely nasty (I assume they get a book of their own later). The hero has a young illegitimate son he is raising, and does not tell the heroine who the mother is. At all. For the entire book. By which I include the ending. As in, we do not find out because it is not relevant and the heroine does not particularly care. I kind of wanted to applaud.

It was perhaps cruel of James to steal the heroine's father's bad poetry from Christopher Smart-- after all poor Smart was both a genuine madman and a genuine poet, and as Johnson said I had as lief pray with him as any man-- but she does admit to it right up front, and that the lines are much, much better when not taken out of context. If people were quoting Kit Smart to me out of context every single day at breakfast for twenty years, I might also depart precipitously at the first hint of better things in life; it is certainly one of the more convincing reasons for a heroine not to want to go home that I can recall.

So, except for a couple of scenes that touched my embarrassment squick, and maybe two moments where the hero lapsed into the sort of annoying alpha-male aggravation that I sometimes suspect is contractually required because it reads as so tacked-on-afterward, this was a well-rounded comedy of manners afraid neither to let its characters play jokes on themselves nor to make them complicated. I'll take it.

Desperate Duchesses, Eloisa James (365 Books, Day 281)

Well that was better than I thought it would be.

The previous Eloisa James I read was a frothy confection of a thing, airy comedy of no particular time period with a penchant for slapstick. This one is quite firmly set in a Regency that is more historically accurate than most romance versions, and provides more depth than I was expecting.

For one thing, this may be the romance novel most focused on its side cast I have seen. And they're interesting. The heroine has come from the country and imposed herself on a distant cousin because she saw a man at a ball and fell in love with him; the cousin's brother is in love with her. All very usual. However, we get a lot of time devoted to the marital feud between the cousin and her husband, which is both funny and genuinely nasty (I assume they get a book of their own later). The hero has a young illegitimate son he is raising, and does not tell the heroine who the mother is. At all. For the entire book. By which I include the ending. As in, we do not find out because it is not relevant and the heroine does not particularly care. I kind of wanted to applaud.

It was perhaps cruel of James to steal the heroine's father's bad poetry from Christopher Smart-- after all poor Smart was both a genuine madman and a genuine poet, and as Johnson said I had as lief pray with him as any man-- but she does admit to it right up front, and that the lines are much, much better when not taken out of context. If people were quoting Kit Smart to me out of context every single day at breakfast for twenty years, I might also depart precipitously at the first hint of better things in life; it is certainly one of the more convincing reasons for a heroine not to want to go home that I can recall.

So, except for a couple of scenes that touched my embarrassment squick, and maybe two moments where the hero lapsed into the sort of annoying alpha-male aggravation that I sometimes suspect is contractually required because it reads as so tacked-on-afterward, this was a well-rounded comedy of manners afraid neither to let its characters play jokes on themselves nor to make them complicated. I'll take it.

You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there.