Transforming Matter: A History of Chemistry from Alchemy to the Buckyball

I'm impressed. This book was written and published in academia. Any of my readers can tell you I have less that a good opinion of the ability of those in academia to write science so that we can understand it, let alone enjoy it. This is one book that managed to do just that, and no, I am not selling it as I need it for my poor students who have horrible textbooks to waddle through. This book not only managed to answer questions that I've had during time when I was a student learning chemistry, a graduate using chemistry in the lab, and now an instructor of chemistry...but it also tied everything together in a nice, fairly short package and get a little physics in there too (as it is hard to totally nonsurgically remove these two topics from being intertwined with each other). This is a book I highly recommend to be used as recommended reading or even required reading for students, since it did not cost much and made so many things much clearer than the more expensive textbooks did. The book introduces the r eader to almost all the major ideas and concepts in chemistry, ties them from the alchemist of the 1700s to the experimenters of the 1800s and so on, and allows the students to make a choice of whether to go on and read much more by giving a decent bibliography. I am going to see if I can find more in these books and series that are as well-written as this book is. Science needs to be understood by everyone, and we should have the choice of whether to take advantage of its accessibility. We shouldn't have to deal with the idea that seems to be cherished among many of the elite at the Ivy League schools that we don't need to be scientifically-literate as announced by the President of Princeton last year when he said that women could not do science...somebody forgot to tell Marie Curie that, and the thousands of women who have worked in and loved science since then. It isn't his decision. It's ours, and every child in this country has a right to equal access to the same information, especially if we work our butts off trying to achieve that equality! Karen L. Sadler Chemistry and Science Education U of PIttsburgh Community College of Allegheny County

The one-sentence review runs thus: anyone with an appreciation for science and/or history, particularly both, will enjoy this book.The author, Trevor Levere, is obviously a consummate historian, with thorough knowledge of the workings of science and its development through the ages. Levere has a keen sense of the humanity and little ironies that make up the twists and turns of the shaping of the state of chemical knowledge at various times, and conveys them in a friendly, readable style. I found the discussion of the various approaches to gases and how knowledge of the gas laws came out out of them particularly interesting (and did you know Robert Boyle in his day was considered an "alchemist"?). The author is very good about zeroing in on the most fertile areas of discovery and expounding upon what came out of them.There are only a couple of minor problems that don't have much impact on the overall flow of the book. One is that Faraday and electrochemistry were introduced rather abruptly, with no information about where charge-sign and current conventions came from. It was something I wanted to learn about, and felt it was rather conspicuously absent. The other is the final chapter, about 20th century chemical discoveries (DNA, buckyballs, yadda yadda), which seemed a bit meandering and aimless as a whole.But overall, excellent, very accessible. Don't hesitate.

Transforming Matter: A History Of Chemistry From Alchemy To The Buckyball is a college-level discourse on the history of chemistry and will serve as a fine basic introduction for any studying the history of science as a whole. Chapters begin with early alchemy to survey the rise of theories about the elements, the creation of classification systems, and relationships between scientific method and practices. An excellent and highly recommended introduction.