Theodore W. Gray

This beautiful book that is both a gorgeous “coffee table book” and an engrossing and informative guide to the 118 known elements makes both a beautiful and educational addition to any house or library.

Each double-page spread is devoted to one element. As the author quotes Lucretius claiming in 50 BC, “There is not anything which returns to nothing, but all things return dissolved into their elements.”

Gray begins with a brief introduction about the periodic table, and then goes show more through the elements in order. On the far right side of each spread, he gives technical information - atomic weight, density, and the like, but it is the main part of each presentation that is so fascinating.

He tells you what the element is like, how it is used, and some special applications of each. Lithium, for example, “has another trick up its sleeve: It keeps some people on an even emotional keel.” Copper has the second-highest electrical conductivity of any metal. Gallium is used in semiconductor crystals, and is also present in early all light-emitting diodes (LEDs). Phosphate fertilizers, he tells us, “are arguably responsible for the explosion of human populations to the point where water, not phosphorus, is now the limiting factor in many places.” Potassium is critical to nerve transmission in the human body. Bismuth makes up most of Pepto-Bismol. Boron is what gives Silly Putty its ability to be both soft and moldable. Uranium is an ingredient in both “vaseline glass” and Fiestaware.

All of these facts, fun as they are, are secondary to the visual aspects of the book, in which amazing large color photos (by both Theodore Gray and Nick Mann) of both the elements and products derived from them make up the bulk of the presentations.

Evaluation: If you ever thought chemistry was “boring,” you are in for a surprise and an intellectual and visual treat. This book is outstanding, and will stimulate your desire to know more about the elements, and how people figured out how to use them. show less

This is a follow-up of sorts to Theodore Gray's earlier book, The Elements: A Visual Exploration of Every Known Atom in the Universe. Unlike that one, this volume cannot possibly be comprehensive because while there are a limited number of elements in the periodic table, the ways in which those elements can combine into molecules is practically infinite. So Gray instead takes us through a sampling of interesting and important molecules, loosely organized by what they're used for by human show more beings.

If you've read The Elements -- and you should! -- this one has a very similar sensibility, with lots and lots of photos of substances the author has painstakingly collected and managed to make visually interesting, despite the tendency of most pure substances to actually just look like boring white powders. There's a nice little basic chemistry lesson at the beginning and all kinds of wonderfully fascinating information to be found throughout the entire book, as Gray tells us, for instance, why teflon is so slippery, how soap works, why oil and water don't mix, and what's in artificial sweeteners, along with tons of other, sometimes much weirder and more obscure things. He does this with a lot of genial humor; in places this book is genuinely laugh-out-loud funny. But he also takes a wonderfully hard-headed and clear-eyed look at things like what the difference is between "natural" and "artificial" substances is (answer: very little), at chemicals that get an undeserved bad rap, and at ones that genuinely are bad news.

It's all extremely interesting and delightfully fun, as weird as that might seem for a book about chemistry, even for a science-minded reader like me. More than that, though, I think it really has shifted my perspective on the world around me. It's one thing to be aware, hypothetically, somewhere in the back of your mind, that everything in the world is made of molecules and almost everything that happens in it comes down to the action of these small, varied entities fitting together and breaking apart, but it's a different experience entirely to find yourself stopping to think about what that really means, and to marvel at the ways in which we human beings have found to shape these tiny interactions to do some very big things. And all the more so when you contemplate just how simple so many of these ultra-important molecules are, and how much small differences between them -- even ones so small it can be hard to notice them on a diagram -- matter in our lives.

In other words, this is pretty, it's entertaining, it's educational, and it's actually kind of mind-blowing. A very, very cool book! show less

This is the final book in Theodore Gray's wonderful non-fiction trilogy about the chemistry of everything around us. The Elements introduced the basic building blocks of that chemistry, Molecules showed the ways in which those building blocks could combine to create an unimaginably vast array of substances, and Reactions looks at some of the ways in which those substances interact with each other to make things happen. We find out here why some materials burn more easily than others, why show more dropping a bottle of nitroglycerine can ruin your whole day, how it's possible to tell by analyzing your breath whether your body is currently burning sugar or fat, why watching grass grow or paint dry should be far less boring than you think, and a great deal more.

As with the previous books, this is a beautifully well-designed volume full of eye-catching photographs. It's also deeply fascinating. I'm extremely impressed with Gray's ability to explain things very clearly and interestingly, in such a way that not only do you understand the science better, but you also find yourself with a new and exciting perspective on the whole world around you. He also writes with a fun, engaging, often very humorous voice.

I definitely recommend all three books, even (or perhaps especially) for those who took high school chemistry and thought it was boring. show less

Theodore Gray, who wrote a fantastic series of books about elements, molecules, and chemical reactions, turns his attention here to something a little more macroscopic, and it turns out he's every bit as knowledgeable and obsessive about machines as he is about chemistry. Specifically, we get chapters on locks, clocks, scales, and textiles, the last of which features cotton gins, looms, sewing machines, and Gray making the world's most expensive potholder by personally doing everything from show more the cotton farming on up.

I'm going to be honest here: I am so utterly mechanically inept that even with Gray's carefully labeled pictures -- and, like the previous books, this one is a beautifully laid-out visual feast -- I am as often as not incapable of understanding what I'm looking and and how the various parts are even supposed to move. But the explanations of the basic principles are good, sometimes downright fascinating, and can really make you appreciate the human ingenuity behind this stuff. Plus, the author's enthusiasm is infectious, and his sense of humor is a delight. I absolutely recommend everything he's done, and this one is no exception. show less