Creations of Fire: Chemistry's Lively History from Alchemy to the Atomic Age

Rating:
Summary: Entertaining, informative, opinionated
Review: Excellent choice for high school or college students trying to get an overview of the field. The author knows her stuff and can present it in fascinating detail. Very readable.

Rating:
Summary: Entertaining, informative, opinionated
Review: Excellent choice for high school or college students trying to get an overview of the field. The author knows her stuff and can present it in fascinating detail. Very readable.

Rating:
Summary: Entertaining, the most to say.
Review: I suspect Cathy Cobb must be a very amusing person. Her historical gleanings about the history of chemistry merit consideration on the basis of what Cathy Cobb has to say about what is an unusually dry subject. As long as rigorous inspection is not your thing, the anecdotes she relates are amusing or are amusing interpretations of not always amusing people and events. I would like to sit in on her classes just to see how students react to her, not her facts. She must be anathema to some of the unenlightened academics that she so outrages by tripping through the hallowed shiboliths and the embalmed reputations of the "leaders in the field' of the history of chemistry.

Rating:
Summary: Entertaining, the most to say.
Review: I suspect Cathy Cobb must be a very amusing person. Her historical gleanings about the history of chemistry merit consideration on the basis of what Cathy Cobb has to say about what is an unusually dry subject. As long as rigorous inspection is not your thing, the anecdotes she relates are amusing or are amusing interpretations of not always amusing people and events. I would like to sit in on her classes just to see how students react to her, not her facts. She must be anathema to some of the unenlightened academics that she so outrages by tripping through the hallowed shiboliths and the embalmed reputations of the "leaders in the field' of the history of chemistry.

Rating:
Summary: key tale told well
Review: If you have to own one chemistry book, this should be the one. It explains the concepts, frames the drama, and avoids the nomenclature and exasperating detail. Chemistry forms the basis of the material world, and the future of many technologies, ranging from medicine and electronics to materials and environmental science. The approach to chemistry, over the millennia, has defined scientific method and ultimately, philosophy of science. From this book, one can grasp the dramatic outline, with all explanations easily digested, and the dramatic highpoints presented with just the right flourish. These two writers do not come from Oxford but rather a state school in California, and they tell the tale with a simplicity and directness that most anybody can appreciate.

Rating:
Summary: key tale told well
Review: If you have to own one chemistry book, this should be the one. It explains the concepts, frames the drama, and avoids the nomenclature and exasperating detail. Chemistry forms the basis of the material world, and the future of many technologies, ranging from medicine and electronics to materials and environmental science. The approach to chemistry, over the millennia, has defined scientific method and ultimately, philosophy of science. From this book, one can grasp the dramatic outline, with all explanations easily digested, and the dramatic highpoints presented with just the right flourish. These two writers do not come from Oxford but rather a state school in California, and they tell the tale with a simplicity and directness that most anybody can appreciate.