A well-written memoir by an author I admire, but less interesting than Sacks's other books. ( )

You might have been a precocious child in your day, but you probably weren't as precocious as Oliver Sacks, whose interest in -- and talent for -- science seems to have manifested itself shortly after he learned to talk. This book is two things: a personal history of an obsession with all things metallic and chemical and a clever, informative, and superbly well-written account of the history of science as told through one British child's home-brewed education. These are both unlikely subjects, so I doubt that "Uncle Tungsten" will be to everyone's taste, but scientific near-illiterates -- like myself -- may find this highly personalized guided tour around the history of science and the periodic table rather charming. Young Sacks's own scientific explorations seem to have closely followed the development of scientific thought itself: to hear him tell it, he raised himself on Victorian-era scientific texts. Whether this was the result of coincidence or some subtle manipulations by his family, many of whose members were also deeply invested in the sciences, is never quite clear. But it, in any event, it makes for a good read. Sacks is particularly good at explaining how each successive refinement of atomic theory or the periodic table transformed our view of the universe. I knew a bit about the evolution of the atomic model, but Sacks explains very clearly why each advance was so shocking and so important to the scientists of that day. While it's obvious that he relishes remembering his happy, active childhood, he also wants us to see the big picture.

It's perhaps inevitable that "Uncle Tungsten" would have something of a nostalgic air, and I found this pretty agreeable. Sacks lovingly describes his parents, aunts, and uncles and fondly recounts their own scientific interests and contributions. Surprisingly, Unlikely as it may seem, Uncle Tungsten wasn't the author's only relative who had a lifelong obsession with a metal or compound. This book reads like a tribute to his large and loving family, whose guiding values seem to have been education and curiosity. It's also an elegy for a lost boyhood community, one in which science brought together and provided a sort of safe haven for all manner of misfits and odd ducks, kids who could be expected to be bullied mercilessly in most boarding-school environments. As a child, Sacks was as much a collector as an experimenter, building up a large collection of all sorts of scientific materials. He laments that most of the houses that sold these raw materials for scientific play have since disappeared. It's sometimes a bit alarming to read about Sack's adventures with potentially explosive chemicals, conducted mostly while he was still in short pants, but it made me question what we've lost now that, these days, of nerdy kids often get into computer games, or programming, or less explicitly physical kinds of intellectual play. "Uncle Tungsten" isn't quite what I expected, and it's an odd amalgam of personal and scientific history, but I'm still glad I picked it up. ( )

One of my favorite science biographies. Sacks weaves a tremendous amount of chemical history into his bio and takes some effort if you don't have a science background but I believe it's worth the effort. He grew up in a different time. Chemistry kits now are somewhat boring because many of the really interesting chemicals have been removed over the years due to well-founded worries about toxicities. Sacks grew up when you could still go and buy chemicals that had dual use as something useful and as a poison. OK, the poisons were/are useful but that's not the point!

I used to assign it over 10 years ago to my General Chemistry I students as required reading and while they appreciated the information, they found it a difficult read over 4-6 weeks of time. The footnotes sometimes span more than one page you can't simply ship through this book without taking time to look up some information. I don't mean to suggest that that detracts from the book but it does make it a potentially challenging read for many people.

It's worth it.

As an aside, it was students' reactions to this book that resulted in a still-running joke in our department. Part of the assignment was for students to write a few paragraphs about the book and a couple of students in each class would complain about the "plot" and that they didn't like my choice of "novels". Hmm. ( )

Summary: A memoir of Sacks boyhood and his explorations of chemistry encouraged by an uncle who used tungsten to manufacture incandescent bulbs.

I’ve enjoyed several of Oliver Sacks books recounting various neurological conditions and the workings of the human brain. I had not been aware of this book until receiving it as a gift. Sacks employs his gifts in telling the story of his childhood, and particularly his fascination with chemistry. In some ways, it came with the territory. His parents were both doctors, who saw patients at their home or permitted Oliver to come on house calls his father would make.

From childhood, Sacks was fascinated with metals and other substances, their color, their weight, how they responded to heating, to being combined with other chemicals. This fascination was fed by by his “Uncle Tungsten” a.k.a Uncle Dave. He was called Uncle Tungsten not only because he made incandescent lamps using tungsten wire, but because he was truly enamored of tungsten, thinking it quite a wonderful metal. He shared this wonder with young Oliver, as well as showing him other metals including aluminum and what happened when you applied mercury to its surface.

Eventually Uncle Tungsten showed him how to set up his own lab bench with the apparatus he needed and how to use it safely. Inevitably there were “stinks and bangs” including an episode with a cuttlefish that made a dwelling uninhabitable for a time. The story is one of curious, self-directed learning that studied spectra, chemical reactions, and families of elements. His discovery of the periodic table, Mendeleev’s Garden, helped make sense of why certain elements were similar in character to others, and even helped predict the character of elements yet to be discovered.

Perhaps the most fascinating chapters were those on “cold” light–fluorescent and phosphorescent elements–and that on X-rays and how they were produced. Here it was Uncle Abe who exposed him to things like radium, at a time when people were only beginning to understand the detrimental effects of radiation on the human body. He speaks of viewing a grain of radium through a spinthariscope and the “shooting stars” he saw through the eyepiece. One wonders if there was any connection between these youthful explorations and the ocular melanoma that resulted in Sacks death.

Sacks did not take up a career in chemistry, obviously. But in this memoir we see the curiosity that fueled his neurological research, his quest to understand how things worked. What a wonderful thing that there were adults in his life who nurtured that curiosity while allowing him the space to pursue self-directed learning. He was a “researcher” long before he became a researcher. And this led to the wonder beyond laws and equations and tables to memorize, the wonder of color, of order, of chemical reactions, and so much more. For Sacks, science became a matter of wonder and wondering.

In our own era of mistrust of science, one wonders if we’ve missed something in science education. What if, instead of mistrust of “authorities” we worked to foster curiosity and wonder? What if, instead of making pronouncements, we worked to foster curiosity? What if instead of endless encouragements of vaccines and masks, we invited curiosity about how COVID is so cussedly good at infecting its human hosts and what happens in the body when it does?

I don’t know if that would change any of our discussions, but I do wonder if a healthy dose of curiosity and wonder, like that which characterized Oliver Sacks “chemical boyhood,” might do us all a bit of good. ( )

This could have been a fascinating memoir, but UNCLE TUNGSTEN: MEMORIES OF A CHEMICAL BOYHOOD suffers from too much science nd not enough memoir. Oliver Sacks grew up in the years before and during the Second World War, a very comfortable Jewish childhood in London, where both his parents were doctors, his father a GP and his mother a surgeon. The youngest of three sons, his world was abruptly changed when he was sent away to a harsh boarding school for his own protection during the war years and the blitz. Small and shy, during these difficult years he found refuge in the study of science, the elements,and chemistry. His Uncle Dave (aka Uncle Tungsten) owned a profitable light bulb factory and was a self-taught scientist himself and encouraged young Oliver's interest. These parts of the story were very interesting. Unfortunately they took a back seat to long chapters about chemistry, minerals, experiments, scientific oddities and discoveries, etc. Science stuff. Which I skimmed over mostly. Finally I gave it up. Sacks is a fine writer though, and I still hope to read that last memoir he wrote just before his death. This one is best suited to readers of more scientific bent than I. Not my cuppa tea.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER ( )