Rating: 
Summary: Wonderful science memoir
Review: This book details the author's childhood love of chemistry, from spectacular reactions to his study of the periodic table.
He tells the stories of some early chemists who discovered elements. For Sacks, each element seems like a complicated and fascinating, automaton toy.His family history, treated almost as an afterthought, is intriguing as well.
Rating: 
Summary: Don't read, please.
Review: This book is so bad. It is not interesting at all. If you don't have a chemical background, you will not understand it. Mr. Vincelette must die!
the end
Rating:
Summary: Beautiful
Review: This book was such a pleasure from beginning to end. It was wonderful to read such an inspiring autobiography, which was intermingled with a history of chemistry. Sacks manages to capture the feelings of discoveries through the ages. Science writing is often so dry that its wonderful to read a book that keeps one captivated throughout.
Rating:
Summary: Delightful Memoir
Review: This is a delightful memoir of Sachs' early years, and his early passion for chemistry. If you are totally uninterested in the sciences, you may not be able to relate to his boyhood passions. But if, like me, you spent your childhood looking through microscopes and blowing stuff up in the basement, you will resonate with Sach's story of his youth. It is fascinating to watch the development of such a brilliant mind. I only wish that Sachs had shared more about his family and what happened to them. For example, I never got to find out what happened to a mentally ill brother.
Rating: 
Summary: Chemisty can be interesting to everyone
Review: This is a fascinating book of Oliver Sacks boyhood in England. It is rich in details with a great number of footnotes. Although at times the chemisty is hard to understand, what shines through is the author's love for the science of not just chemisty per se but photography and nature as well.
Rating:
Summary: I Hate to Burp In Church, But...
Review: This is a very bad book. It was originally a (decent) magazine article, in The New Yorker; but it suffers dreadfully from being expanded to book length. The way Dr. Sacks manages this feat of expansion is with page-after-unending-page discussing the history of Chemistry, of all things. Well, Chemistry, it turns out, was Dr. Sacks' youthful passion. (My youthful passion was slot cars, but I hope my relatives put me in a home if I ever show an inclination to fill a book about that subject, under the guise of autobiography). I suppose that if a reader happens to actually be interested in the history of Chemistry, one could do worse, but if one is fooled by the cover, and the other editorial reviews, one might think it is essentially an autobiography. It is not. The shame of all this is that Dr. Sacks led an interesting life, in interesting times, but what we we learn of him and his times is only what we can pick up on the way to one more disquisition on Chemistry. We learn, for example, that Dr. Sacks was packed off to boarding school, and didn't like it, much. Why? Well, there was a nasty headmaster, and lousy food. That's a pretty fair summation of Sacks' coverage of THAT subject. On the way to another Chemical investigation, we learn a tiny bit about Sacks' immediate family. Both his parents were Doctors. We could be told a little about the practice of medicine in England during the Second World War, but we are not. We could be told about relations between Jews and Gentiles in England, but we are not. We could be told about Sacks' mother's experiences as a female physician, but we are not. While I, at least, am learning far too much about Lavoisier, Boyle, and Faraday, a schizophrenic brother of Sacks appears, and just as swiftly, disappears. What happened to him? We aren't told. A relative dies, in his house. Of what? Some sort of congestive heart failure, but we aren't specifically told much more about the disease, and all we know about the relative is barely enough to flesh out a 2-dimensional cutout of a real human being. Sacks furnishes a chemical laboratory in his parents house. He nearly poisons himself, and the parental response is a fume hood. A discussion of various theories of child-rearing might ensue, here, to good effect, but of course it does not. Sacks seems to have an unending source of money (no doubt in the place of parental supervision) for a young lad, but we really don't know. Is this how all youngsters grew up, in England, before the war? Did Sacks notice that other children did not have the wherewithal to furnish a chemical laboratory? We. Don't. Know. Finally, and I mean, finally, the book ends with Sacks going off to medical school. He breezily explains the preceeding 300-or-so pages enthusiastically proclaiming the virtues of Chemistry as some sort of youthful divagation. But there is an intimation that it was his parents who made the decision that the young Dr. Sacks would go to medical school. But again, we really know nothing, because we are told nothing. We are told that the unexamined life is not worth living. If this is Dr Sacks' idea of an examined life, I feel truly sorry for him.
Rating:
Summary: A Very Human Story
Review: This was one of those books that I read slowly, and I was sorry when it ended. Oliver Sacks, author of AWAKENINGS (which later became a movie starring Robin Williams) here recalls his "chemical boyhood" growing up in England during the Second World War. Precocious and blessed with a wonderful curiosity about chemistry and chemists at an early age, Sacks sets up a home laboratory in his parents' house and experiments his way, by age 14, to a hands-on understanding of chemistry that I would bet many graduate students today could not match. Sacks is particularly adept at reconstructing the full world of his youth as if he were experiencing things again for the first time. What emerges is Sacks' self-discovered view not only of the periodic table and Sir Humphrey Davy, but also the memories of a boy living in a place that's being bombed by Germans.
A very human story, told by a great storyteller.
Rating: 
Summary: Not his best
Review: Typical Sacks fare is an engaging exploration of his scientific interests and some fascinating tangents. That Oliver Sacks is(apparently) a very interesting man helps a lot, too. Like most of us though, Oliver Sacks was not a very interesting child. While "Uncle Tungsten" has some very good science writing, it is really nothing more than the story of a socialy inept boy who went rather too far with his chemistry set. Again, like most of us, his family was strange. If you haven't picked up "The Isle of the Colorblind" or "The Man who mistook his wife for a hat", get them instead. If you're a hard-core Sacks fan, pick this one up at the library first.
Rating:
Summary: Not his best
Review: Typical Sacks fare is an engaging exploration of his scientific interests and some fascinating tangents. That Oliver Sacks is(apparently) a very interesting man helps a lot, too. Like most of us though, Oliver Sacks was not a very interesting child. While "Uncle Tungsten" has some very good science writing, it is really nothing more than the story of a socialy inept boy who went rather too far with his chemistry set. Again, like most of us, his family was strange. If you haven't picked up "The Isle of the Colorblind" or "The Man who mistook his wife for a hat", get them instead. If you're a hard-core Sacks fan, pick this one up at the library first.
Rating:
Summary: Too Much Chemistry, Not Enough Autobiography
Review: Unless you are REALLY, REALLY, REALLY interested in chemistry, this book will be a disappointment. How many sentences of the type: "If an element was compounded with nitrogen, phosphorus, or sulfur, it became a nitride, phosphide, a sulfide. If acids were formed, through the addition of oxygen, one might speak of nitric acid, phosphoric acid, sulfuric acid; and of the salts of these as nitrates, phosphates, and sulfates." can you read before dozing off?
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