The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean

(Little, Brown, 400 pages, $24.99)

Not everyone could find something interesting to say about every one of the 118 elements on the periodic table, said Clint Witchalls in New Scientist. But science writer Sam Kean “has Bill Bryson’s comic touch,” and he’s used his passion for chemistry—along with a library’s worth of interesting historical tidbits—to produce one of publishing’s surprise hits of the summer. Kean frames the ambitions of his endeavor with typical wit, informing readers that he will be spending relatively little time on the hydrogen particles that compose 90 percent of the universe or the “other 10 percent” that are helium. “Everything else,” he acknowledges, “is a cosmic rounding error.” But that’s where he focuses our attention.

Kean’s title comes from an old parlor trick that showcased gallium’s special properties, said Caroline Leavitt in The Boston Globe. Spoons made of gallium look as solid as aluminum, but they turn to liquid at the temperature of hot tea. Cadmium, we learn, is a gorgeous metal that deserves much credit for the vibrant yellows used by many 19th-century painters. But when rice paddies in Japan were contaminated by cadmium waste in the 1930s and 1940s, countless farmers were stricken by the painful symptoms of what became known as the “ouch-ouch” disease. So when the makers of Godzilla needed to imagine a weapon that could kill the giant lizard, they dreamed up “cadmium-tipped missiles.”

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Through no fault of Kean’s, the straight chemistry that finds its way into The Disappearing Spoon can be a little hard to grasp, said Leonard Cassuto in Salon.com. Readers who’ve forgotten what they learned in high school would have benefitted from a few molecular diagrams as visual aids. Still, the book isn’t intended to be a chemistry primer. It “has the structure of a Christmas tree,” in which the trunk is a history of the effort to classify the elements and the ornaments are the people over the years who have lied, stumbled, and braved their way toward discovery and knowledge. This is a book offering many gifts. “Some of them even glow in the dark.”