AMAZON - The Periodic Kingdom is a journey of imagination in which Peter Atkins treats the periodic table of elements - the 109 chemical elements in the world, from which everything is made - as a country, a periodic kingdom, each region of which corresponds to an element. Arranged much like a travel guide, the book introduces the reader to the general features of the table, the history of the elements, and the underlying arrangement of the table in terms of the structure and properties of atoms. Atkins sees elements as finely balanced living personalities, with quirks of character and certain, not always outward, dispositions, and the kingdom is thus a land of intellectual satisfaction and infinite delight.

I bought this book because I became interested again in chemical elements, and I had been searching for a non-technical book on elements. It was lightweight, although I recognized the author of a quantum mechanics book that I used in college and still have on my shelf, mostly to impress the unwary. Atkins describes the periodic table in a geographic sense, plotting various features of the elements as altitudes across the kingdom. He eventually gets to atomic orbitals as an explanation for the features of ionization energies, density, mass and other properties. I was reminded of very early days at the Mitchell Library in New Haven, looking at a book on the elements. ( )

The Periodic Kingdom is an easy read, and can teach you something. I like that. In fact, I’ve enjoyed anything I’ve read from The Science Masters Series.

My review (along with my brother's) is on my Blog, Nate's Library, specifically at: http://nates-library.blogspot.com/200... ( )

The book is written in a travel guide format which led me to believe that the point was to make the information accessible to everyone and more enjoyable to read than a text book. I think it only partly succeeded. It does give you some good general ideas about how the periodic table came about and how everything goes together but when it goes into detail the narrative bogs down and becomes hard to read. Sometimes the information is just too dense and without some previous knowledge of the subject it will be read but not quite understood and then quickly forgotten. ( )

The concept behind this book is quite cute - a travel guide to the land of the periodic table. It has all the chapters you'd expect to find in a country guide - geography, history, government etc and twists the theory of the periodic table to fit in the structure. It sounds fun enough, but it lacks the humour necessary to pull it off enjoyably. What you actually have is a GCSE chemistry text with occasional flurries of artistic phrasing. The early chapters laid the geography stuff on too thick and it came across as contrived, later chapters seemed to all but give up on the idea. It's ok, but I didn't really get anything out of it and I suspect it would confuse anyone that didn't know the stuff already. ( )