Customer Reviews:
 Everybody CAN understand Science July 24, 2003
A. VanHecke (Milwaukee, WI)
116 out of 118 found this review helpful
This terrific book helps make a complex area of science - the field of chemistry and the periodic table - accessible to everyone. Benjamin Wiker skillfully and humorously takes us through the history of theories, experiments, mistakes and successes in understanding the elements and the development of the Periodic Table. The icing on the cake is how fascinating the order of the table is and how closely and mathematically the elements are related to each other. Fascinating!The book is written for ages 10 and up, but high schoolers and even college students would benefit from the memorable way this book presents the big picture and helps it 'stick.' The last three chapters are a little tougher to follow. I found it helpful to draw some of my own diagrams of the various atoms and their electron structure.
 good popular science August 29, 2003
Beth Dougherty (Steubenville, OH United States)
102 out of 106 found this review helpful
By putting over 3,000 years of faces on the search for the elemental principles -- from the Greek philosopher Anaximander, who held that all the material world was made of four "elements", Earth, Air, Fire, and Water; to teams of modern scientists who race to create new elements -- Benjamin Wiker has moved chemistry off the shelf of dry-and-dusty arcania and given the reader a gum-shoe tale filled with odd and interesting characters. This book is an excellent remedy for people who think the sciences were hatched in university laboratories, or born the test-tube children of egg-headed professors. Tracing the theories of philosophers, alchemists, and scientists, making acquaintance with men of all walks and many nationalities, whose only common trait was their persistent desire to peer ever deeper into the nature of things, Wiker not only outlines the genealogy of the Periodic Table of Elements, but, so doing, introduces his reader to the principles of theoretical and practical science, to the history of the scientific method, and even inklings of atomic theory. This book will be accessible, and of interest, to a wide range of readers: those with no science background can still follow the general story with ease, while even the reader well-versed in high-school level chemistry has probably never encountered the history of modern chemistry synthesized with such clarity and appeal.
 Chemists biographies interesting but too heavy on actual chemistry February 10, 2008
L. Schaerr
5 out of 8 found this review helpful
The biographical information is interesting but some of the chemistry information is too deep for my children (12, 9, 7) who are listening to me read this. I think it would work better if I read the chapters ahead and just pulled out the interesting parts and explained the concept the chapter wants to get across in a simpler format.
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