--- product_id: 1636041 title: "The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements" price: "$35.21" currency: USD in_stock: true reviews_count: 13 url: https://www.desertcart.us/products/1636041-the-disappearing-spoon-and-other-true-tales-of-madness-love store_origin: US region: United States of America --- # The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements **Price:** $35.21 **Availability:** ✅ In Stock ## Quick Answers - **What is this?** The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements - **How much does it cost?** $35.21 with free shipping - **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship - **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.us](https://www.desertcart.us/products/1636041-the-disappearing-spoon-and-other-true-tales-of-madness-love) ## Best For - Customers looking for quality international products ## Why This Product - Free international shipping included - Worldwide delivery with tracking - 15-day hassle-free returns ## Description From New York Times bestselling author Sam Kean comes incredible stories of science, history, finance, mythology, the arts, medicine, and more, as told by the Periodic Table. Why did Gandhi hate iodine (I, 53)? How did radium (Ra, 88) nearly ruin Marie Curie's reputation? And why is gallium (Ga, 31) the go-to element for laboratory pranksters? The Periodic Table is a crowning scientific achievement, but it's also a treasure trove of adventure, betrayal, and obsession. These fascinating tales follow every element on the table as they play out their parts in human history, and in the lives of the (frequently) mad scientists who discovered them. The Disappearing Spoon masterfully fuses science with the classic lore of invention, investigation, and discovery -- from the Big Bang through the end of time. Though solid at room temperature, gallium is a moldable metal that melts at 84 degrees Fahrenheit. A classic science prank is to mold gallium spoons, serve them with tea, and watch guests recoil as their utensils disappear. Review: If you have any love for history or science and enjoy learning - If you have any love for history or science and enjoy learning, this book will be a wonderful read. In The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean, readers are given a skillful and engaging series of stories about each and every element on the periodic table. Kean does an amazing job of giving historical content while building characters, stories, and emotion around something as simple as different types of atoms. He even tricks the reader into learning a bit about the periodic table: teaching lessons on toxicity disguised as the story of Lewis and Clark and lessons about shells in the nucleus disguised the story of a struggling female professor in the early twentieth century. Summary The analogies and explanations of things as confusing and complex as the layering of electron shells and complex protein folding in terms which anyone can understand. Even though the book is intended to be read by those with little to no knowledge of chemistry, as a veteran of AP Chemistry I learned immense amounts from this book. Even if you know all there is to know about chemistry, this book is full of humor and history, and narrative all interwoven with a satisfying educational experience. The stories of the elements are ordered by topic, rather than time period or elemental number, which aids the natural feeling of the book- flowing from one story to another. My personal favorite was the story of Mendeleev. A brilliant chemist, one of fifteen siblings, whose mother recognized his potential as a young boy, and rode 1400 miles on horseback just to admit her son to a university. After becoming a brilliant student, Mendeleev’s career became a race against other great scientists to create a comprehensive list of all of the elements known to man. But the difference between Mendeleev’s invention and the others of the time was that he included not only the elements known to man, but also those unknown. Mendeleev left gaps and blank spaces in his periodic table for the elements which had not yet been discovered. Not only did he create the most accurate periodic table yet, but he made accurate predictions of the properties of many of the missing elements. In one such case, he publicly denounced the discovery of a new element until the scientist redid his experiments to prove that Mendeleev was right...and he was. Final Review I give this book five stars. There aren’t many negatives about this book. At times, I believed the book would slow down. Maybe it’s just because I enjoy such things, but there is always a description of someone’s life story, some political conflict of the time, some chemical or physical challenge which had to be overcome, or a fact I didn’t know - the book never seems to slow. The flow of the story is fantastic, it’s educational, and consistently engaging. This book is definitely going on my top ten. If you don’t like being bombarded with information, this book may not be for you, but give it a shot. It’s worth the time. Review: Who knew chemistry was such fun? Other than the chemists... - One of the prettiest books I have on my shelves right now is Theodore Gray's The Elements, a visual collection of all the elements that make up the physical universe. "Everything you can drop on your foot," as he says. In it, he provides wonderful pictures and descriptions of the elements that we know, arranged as they would be in the periodic table. It's a gorgeous book, one that everyone should have - especially if you have children. If you want your kids to become interested in science and investigating the world around them, you could do far worse than to have this book on your shelves. Eventually, though, they'll be old enough and canny enough to ask, "Well, how do we know all this? Where did we find these things, and how? And why are they in this order?" That's the point where you hand them The Disappearing Spoon, sit back, and let Sam Kean take over. The story of the elements, and our understanding of them, is governed just as much by personality as by p-shells, as much by competition as by charge, as much by ego as by electrons. While the elements themselves don't pay any attention to human affairs, the quest to understand the building blocks of matter have sent us to the hearts of stars, the depths of the earth and, for various reasons, Ytterby, Sweden. [1] Kean starts with how he got into the elements, with a story that would horrify modern-day parents: mercury. When he was a kid, his mother would collect the mercury from broken thermometers and keep it in a little bottle on a high shelf. If they were lucky, she would let her children play with it for a while, swirling it around and watching while this shiny liquid metal split apart and fused back together perfectly, never leaving a bit of itself behind. It was a metal that flowed like water, and it was fascinating. If he had known at that age that ancient alchemists thought there were spirits living in mercury, he would not have been surprised. Keeping an eye out for mercury, he learned that modern scientists are able to follow the expedition of Lewis and Clark using mercury. The explorers carried with them a good quantity of Dr. Benjamin Rush's Bilious Pills, a "cure" for any illness that mainly contained mercury chloride. It was vile stuff, poisoning everyone who took it, but without an FDA around to stop this kind of nonsense, Rush made plenty of money. It probably didn't hurt his credibility that he was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. In any case, he gave samples to the Lewis and Clark expedition, and their latrine sites can still be found today by the unusually high levels of mercury that were deposited there as the men's bodies tried to get rid of the heavy metal as quickly as possible. Mercury also taught Kean about mythology - the Roman god of communication, modeled on the Greek message-bearer. It taught him etymology - the chemical symbol for mercury is Hg, which is derived from the Latin hydragyrum, which means "silver water." It informed him on literature, especially the Mad Hatter of Alice in Wonderland, who was based on the poor crazies who used to breathe in the fumes of mercury while setting felt for their hats. This one weird, eerie element was a door into so many other topics that he figured there must be others. And so he started work on this book, a collection of histories and tales, gossip and hearsay, all centered around the 118 physical elements that make up our universe. "As we know," he writes, "90 percent of particles in the universe are hydrogen, and the other 10 percent are helium. Everything else, including six million billion billion kilos of earth, is a cosmic rounding error." Within that rounding error, though, some amazing things have been found. In the 19th century, the Russian Dimitri Mendeleev examined the common properties of different elements and was able to sort the elements in such a way that took advantage of their similarities. The violent alkalies along the far left, which will explode if given half a chance, and their cousins, the halogens on the far right, some of the most reactive elements in nature. Separating them are the noble gasses, which don't react with anything unless pushed to extremes. Without knowing about electron shells and the weird quantum things that happen on the atomic level, Mendeleev managed to put together a table so good that he was able to leave gaps in it that corresponded to elements that hadn't yet been found. And by telling the world that these gaps existed, the race to isolate and discover the elements was on. Kean's book is a great look at the way science works on a human level. How the search for high-quality porcelain led to the discovery of an entire class of elements, how Marie Curie would get into trouble by dragging her (male) colleagues into dark closets to show them how radium glowed, how nitrogen kills with kindness and lithium quiets an unsettled mind. The competition to not only find these elements but to name them and find uses for them has driven science forward in all fields, from geology to neurology, for the last two hundred years. Those 118 squares on the periodic table have driven men to travel the world, to create economic and political empires, to love, to hate, and to murder. If this kind of thing were taught in high school chemistry class, there would probably be a lot more kids interested in science as a career. The book is very readable, even if it does drift from time to time into more technical areas. One of my colleagues, who doesn't have an extensive background in science, said she was a little slowed down by talk of electron shells and quantum jumps, which I guess were not aided by Kean's elevator similes. But it did get her asking the right questions - how do we know atoms exist if we can't see them? How can we be sure that what is in this book is true? Those are the questions that Kean tries to answer in the book, but it's also the kind of book that may bring up more questions. It's "gateway science," one of those books that pulls away the cold, rational veneer of the scientist and his or her endeavors, and shows what an exciting, weird, messy and dramatic place science can be. What's more, it shows how science is deeply ingrained not only into our technology, but our language, history and politics. An understanding of science, even at an amateur level, is a wonderful way to open your eyes to the great, complex and bizarre world in which we live. ----------------------------------------------------------- "We eat and breathe the periodic table; people bet and lose huge sums on it; philosophers use it to probe the meaning of science; it poisons people; it spawns wars. Between hydrogen at the top left and the man-made impossibilities lurking along the bottom, you can find bubbles, bombs, money, alchemy, petty politics, history, poison, crime, and love. Even some science." - Sam Kean, The Disappearing Spoon ------------------------------------------------------------ [1] The town has the distinct honor of having four elements named after it: yttrium (Y), ytterbium (Yb), terbium (Tb), and erbium (Er). What has your hometown got? ## Technical Specifications | Specification | Value | |---------------|-------| | Best Sellers Rank | #10,066 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #1 in Inorganic Chemistry (Books) #2 in General Chemistry #21 in History & Philosophy of Science (Books) | | Customer Reviews | 4.5 out of 5 stars 3,451 Reviews | ## Images ![The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/A1MRdbCMR+L.jpg) ## Customer Reviews ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ If you have any love for history or science and enjoy learning *by T***R on June 8, 2018* If you have any love for history or science and enjoy learning, this book will be a wonderful read. In The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean, readers are given a skillful and engaging series of stories about each and every element on the periodic table. Kean does an amazing job of giving historical content while building characters, stories, and emotion around something as simple as different types of atoms. He even tricks the reader into learning a bit about the periodic table: teaching lessons on toxicity disguised as the story of Lewis and Clark and lessons about shells in the nucleus disguised the story of a struggling female professor in the early twentieth century. Summary The analogies and explanations of things as confusing and complex as the layering of electron shells and complex protein folding in terms which anyone can understand. Even though the book is intended to be read by those with little to no knowledge of chemistry, as a veteran of AP Chemistry I learned immense amounts from this book. Even if you know all there is to know about chemistry, this book is full of humor and history, and narrative all interwoven with a satisfying educational experience. The stories of the elements are ordered by topic, rather than time period or elemental number, which aids the natural feeling of the book- flowing from one story to another. My personal favorite was the story of Mendeleev. A brilliant chemist, one of fifteen siblings, whose mother recognized his potential as a young boy, and rode 1400 miles on horseback just to admit her son to a university. After becoming a brilliant student, Mendeleev’s career became a race against other great scientists to create a comprehensive list of all of the elements known to man. But the difference between Mendeleev’s invention and the others of the time was that he included not only the elements known to man, but also those unknown. Mendeleev left gaps and blank spaces in his periodic table for the elements which had not yet been discovered. Not only did he create the most accurate periodic table yet, but he made accurate predictions of the properties of many of the missing elements. In one such case, he publicly denounced the discovery of a new element until the scientist redid his experiments to prove that Mendeleev was right...and he was. Final Review I give this book five stars. There aren’t many negatives about this book. At times, I believed the book would slow down. Maybe it’s just because I enjoy such things, but there is always a description of someone’s life story, some political conflict of the time, some chemical or physical challenge which had to be overcome, or a fact I didn’t know - the book never seems to slow. The flow of the story is fantastic, it’s educational, and consistently engaging. This book is definitely going on my top ten. If you don’t like being bombarded with information, this book may not be for you, but give it a shot. It’s worth the time. ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Who knew chemistry was such fun? Other than the chemists... *by C***S on June 23, 2012* One of the prettiest books I have on my shelves right now is Theodore Gray's The Elements, a visual collection of all the elements that make up the physical universe. "Everything you can drop on your foot," as he says. In it, he provides wonderful pictures and descriptions of the elements that we know, arranged as they would be in the periodic table. It's a gorgeous book, one that everyone should have - especially if you have children. If you want your kids to become interested in science and investigating the world around them, you could do far worse than to have this book on your shelves. Eventually, though, they'll be old enough and canny enough to ask, "Well, how do we know all this? Where did we find these things, and how? And why are they in this order?" That's the point where you hand them The Disappearing Spoon, sit back, and let Sam Kean take over. The story of the elements, and our understanding of them, is governed just as much by personality as by p-shells, as much by competition as by charge, as much by ego as by electrons. While the elements themselves don't pay any attention to human affairs, the quest to understand the building blocks of matter have sent us to the hearts of stars, the depths of the earth and, for various reasons, Ytterby, Sweden. [1] Kean starts with how he got into the elements, with a story that would horrify modern-day parents: mercury. When he was a kid, his mother would collect the mercury from broken thermometers and keep it in a little bottle on a high shelf. If they were lucky, she would let her children play with it for a while, swirling it around and watching while this shiny liquid metal split apart and fused back together perfectly, never leaving a bit of itself behind. It was a metal that flowed like water, and it was fascinating. If he had known at that age that ancient alchemists thought there were spirits living in mercury, he would not have been surprised. Keeping an eye out for mercury, he learned that modern scientists are able to follow the expedition of Lewis and Clark using mercury. The explorers carried with them a good quantity of Dr. Benjamin Rush's Bilious Pills, a "cure" for any illness that mainly contained mercury chloride. It was vile stuff, poisoning everyone who took it, but without an FDA around to stop this kind of nonsense, Rush made plenty of money. It probably didn't hurt his credibility that he was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. In any case, he gave samples to the Lewis and Clark expedition, and their latrine sites can still be found today by the unusually high levels of mercury that were deposited there as the men's bodies tried to get rid of the heavy metal as quickly as possible. Mercury also taught Kean about mythology - the Roman god of communication, modeled on the Greek message-bearer. It taught him etymology - the chemical symbol for mercury is Hg, which is derived from the Latin hydragyrum, which means "silver water." It informed him on literature, especially the Mad Hatter of Alice in Wonderland, who was based on the poor crazies who used to breathe in the fumes of mercury while setting felt for their hats. This one weird, eerie element was a door into so many other topics that he figured there must be others. And so he started work on this book, a collection of histories and tales, gossip and hearsay, all centered around the 118 physical elements that make up our universe. "As we know," he writes, "90 percent of particles in the universe are hydrogen, and the other 10 percent are helium. Everything else, including six million billion billion kilos of earth, is a cosmic rounding error." Within that rounding error, though, some amazing things have been found. In the 19th century, the Russian Dimitri Mendeleev examined the common properties of different elements and was able to sort the elements in such a way that took advantage of their similarities. The violent alkalies along the far left, which will explode if given half a chance, and their cousins, the halogens on the far right, some of the most reactive elements in nature. Separating them are the noble gasses, which don't react with anything unless pushed to extremes. Without knowing about electron shells and the weird quantum things that happen on the atomic level, Mendeleev managed to put together a table so good that he was able to leave gaps in it that corresponded to elements that hadn't yet been found. And by telling the world that these gaps existed, the race to isolate and discover the elements was on. Kean's book is a great look at the way science works on a human level. How the search for high-quality porcelain led to the discovery of an entire class of elements, how Marie Curie would get into trouble by dragging her (male) colleagues into dark closets to show them how radium glowed, how nitrogen kills with kindness and lithium quiets an unsettled mind. The competition to not only find these elements but to name them and find uses for them has driven science forward in all fields, from geology to neurology, for the last two hundred years. Those 118 squares on the periodic table have driven men to travel the world, to create economic and political empires, to love, to hate, and to murder. If this kind of thing were taught in high school chemistry class, there would probably be a lot more kids interested in science as a career. The book is very readable, even if it does drift from time to time into more technical areas. One of my colleagues, who doesn't have an extensive background in science, said she was a little slowed down by talk of electron shells and quantum jumps, which I guess were not aided by Kean's elevator similes. But it did get her asking the right questions - how do we know atoms exist if we can't see them? How can we be sure that what is in this book is true? Those are the questions that Kean tries to answer in the book, but it's also the kind of book that may bring up more questions. It's "gateway science," one of those books that pulls away the cold, rational veneer of the scientist and his or her endeavors, and shows what an exciting, weird, messy and dramatic place science can be. What's more, it shows how science is deeply ingrained not only into our technology, but our language, history and politics. An understanding of science, even at an amateur level, is a wonderful way to open your eyes to the great, complex and bizarre world in which we live. ----------------------------------------------------------- "We eat and breathe the periodic table; people bet and lose huge sums on it; philosophers use it to probe the meaning of science; it poisons people; it spawns wars. Between hydrogen at the top left and the man-made impossibilities lurking along the bottom, you can find bubbles, bombs, money, alchemy, petty politics, history, poison, crime, and love. Even some science." - Sam Kean, The Disappearing Spoon ------------------------------------------------------------ [1] The town has the distinct honor of having four elements named after it: yttrium (Y), ytterbium (Yb), terbium (Tb), and erbium (Er). What has your hometown got? ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Loved it *by A***N on February 27, 2013* I am an engineer, and have spent a good chunk of my life dealing with parts of the periodic table. I bought this book on an impulse, and I am glad I did. It was a very enjoyable experience reading it, and I was sorry when it came to an end. === The Good Stuff === * Sam Kean does a great job in mixing a litte science, a touch of history, some genuine supposition and a dash of humor. The result is a view of the periodic table, its history, and a number of stories about some of its residents. He writes in a fun, easy to read style, and doesn't include a lot of technical jargon or fifteen letter words. * Kean is mostly careful about what is proven knowledge versus what is informed supposition, although he occasionally gets careless with what is fact versus hearsay. Still, most of the "how this was discovered" stories are more for entertainment value, this is a perfectly acceptable standard. * While this is in no way a chemistry or physics book, to understand the beauty, logic, and difficulty in constructing the periodic table, you need to know some details about the structure of an atom. Kean strikes a nice balance. The text is technical enough to highlight what makes the periodic table so clever and useful, but yet perfectly understandable by anyone with even the slightest hint of how an atom is constructed. * Kean has a gift of tying history, myth, science and intelligent guesswork together. As an example, he relates a tale of an area of Asia Minor, where copper, zinc and tin ores exist, often mingled together. Copper and tin, mixed together make bronze, a dull, yellowy metal. But copper and zinc mixed together make brass, a very shiny golden metal, which can plausibly be mistaken for gold by ancient alchemists. And Asia Minor is noted for having some very early bronze foundries, and coincidentally, the legendary home of King Midas. Kean can't prove that some ancient process for replacing the tin in bronze with zinc, and thereby making brass, was mistaken for alchemy, but it is an interesting bit of supposition.. Kean also relates a marvelous story about John Bardeen, who won the Nobel prize for the transistor in the 1950's. At the award ceremony, the King of Sweden asked why he hadn't brought his sons along to the ceremony. "Next time" quipped Bardeen. In 1972, when he was awarded a 2nd Nobel Prize for superconductivity, Bardeen introduced his adult sons to the King. === The Not-So-Good Stuff=== * Kean writes with a sarcastic wit, something that I enjoy but which some readers might find objectionable. * Some of the tales that Kean relates, for instance the story of Lise Meitner, are rather complicated and involve a fairly obtuse plot and cast of characters. Her discovery of fission, and the lack of credit she received for it are more appropriate for a 300 page work rather than a page or two. A brief overview poses more questions than it answers. === Summary === * A very enjoyable book. Its obvious appeal is to anyone who is more than a casual user of the periodic table. However, there are enough stories and anecdotes in the book that even non-techies will probably enjoy it. I'd recommend it to anyone who has ever stared at the familiar chart in any classroom and wondered what it means. ## Frequently Bought Together - The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements - Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World - Napoleon's Buttons: How 17 Molecules Changed History --- ## Why Shop on Desertcart? - 🛒 **Trusted by 1.3+ Million Shoppers** — Serving international shoppers since 2016 - 🌍 **Shop Globally** — Access 737+ million products across 21 categories - 💰 **No Hidden Fees** — All customs, duties, and taxes included in the price - 🔄 **15-Day Free Returns** — Hassle-free returns (30 days for PRO members) - 🔒 **Secure Payments** — Trusted payment options with buyer protection - ⭐ **TrustPilot Rated 4.5/5** — Based on 8,000+ happy customer reviews **Shop now:** [https://www.desertcart.us/products/1636041-the-disappearing-spoon-and-other-true-tales-of-madness-love](https://www.desertcart.us/products/1636041-the-disappearing-spoon-and-other-true-tales-of-madness-love) --- *Product available on Desertcart United States of America* *Store origin: US* *Last updated: 2026-07-14*