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Loading... Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhoodby Oliver Sacks
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. This is a book that holds the attention for its woonderful fresh insights into the world of chemistry, as well as a description of the author's family and life in an extended medical scientifically literate Jewish family in London during the war years. I give it to my year 11 chem students (a chapter at a time) as it has a beguiling introduction to the importance of chemistry in our lives. (  )lovell | Jan 8, 2009 |   After reading this book, I'm still not sure if it was intended as a memoire, or as a brief history of chemistry. The author gives us glimpses of his family life, especially the role his mother and uncles played in encouraging his love of chemistry. He spends a lot more time talking about chemistry and scientific discoveries, which was less interesting to me. I found the book rather sad at the end. All the love of chemistry that permeated Oliver Sacks' life was repressed when he reading adolescence as it was expected he would become a doctor. Which he did -- and where he has made a large difference to many lives. But what would have happened had he followed his heart? (  )LynnB | Oct 6, 2008 | This is a memoir of the author's early boyhood when he was fascinated by chemistry. I was expecting the majority of the book to be about the many intelligent and probably interesting members of the Sacks' family, most notably his Uncle Dave (Uncle Tungsten). However, the personal glimpses were few and lacked much depth. Instead, this was primarily a quick recapitulation of the history of chemical thought. For this, I was just the wrong audience. When told that Henry Cavendish discovered hydrogen, that Mendeleev devised the periodic table, etc., instead of a quickening of interest, my response was continuously, "Yes, I know." If you didn't take (or have largely forgotten) high school chemistry, and have some interest in science, then this book will provide you with a recounting of chemical thought from earliest times up through Niels Bohr's quantum theories about electrons. It's well-written and very accessible. If you do remember your high school chemistry, the book will probably disappoint a bit. (  )TadAD | Aug 19, 2008 | A perfectly marvelous memoir- my daughter ( a Chemical Engineer) has read it three times! ( )JNSelko | Jun 20, 2008 | A childhood memoir & journey throught the history of Chemistry. For me, a very interesting read but how much of what he did as a child can we do now? - Not much (  )mjmorrison1971 | Mar 30, 2008 | 0.053 seconds to build listing  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com Amazon.com's Best of 2001 (ISBN 0375404481, Hardcover)Oliver Sacks's luminous memoir charts the growth of a mind. Born in 1933 into a family of formidably intelligent London Jews, he discovered the wonders of the physical sciences early from his parents and their flock of brilliant siblings, most notably "Uncle Tungsten" (real name, Dave), who "manufactured lightbulbs with filaments of fine tungsten wire." Metals were the substances that first attracted young Oliver, and his descriptions of their colors, textures, and properties are as sensuous and romantic as an art lover's rhapsodies over an Old Master. Seamlessly interwoven with his personal recollections is a masterful survey of scientific history, with emphasis on the great chemists like Robert Boyle, Antoine Lavoisier, and Humphry Davy (Sacks's personal hero). Yet this is not a dry intellectual autobiography; his parents in particular, both doctors, are vividly sketched. His sociable father loved house calls and "was drawn to medicine because its practice was central in human society," while his shy mother "had an intense feeling for structure ... for her [medicine] was part of natural history and biology." For young Oliver, unhappy at the brutal boarding school he was sent to during the war, and afraid that he would become mentally ill like his older brother, chemistry was a refuge in an uncertain world. He would outgrow his passion for metals and become a neurologist, but as readers of Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat know, he would never leave behind his conviction that science is a profoundly human endeavor. --Wendy Smith(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:03 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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