The Disappearing Spoon

The Disappearing Spoon
Author: Sam Kean 2010 375 pp
My rating: 3*
Started October 18 2010, Finished October 29 2010

The subtitle of this book, “And other true tales of madness, love, and the history of the world from the periodic table of the elements” pretty much says it all. There is no overarching theme, just a series of interesting stories from the world of elemental chemistry. While I found it interesting and enjoyable, its disjointed nature left me without much of an impression. In two weeks, I probably won’t remember much of “The Disappearing Spoon” at all.


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Unlike modern pills, these hard antimony pills didn’t dissolve in the intestines, and the pills were considered so valuable that people rooted through fecal matter to retrieve and reuse them. Some lucky families even passed down laxatives from father to son. (22)

“But since this Japanese Vulcan died with his secret, it was lost for five hundred years -- proof that superior technology does not always spread and often goes extinct” (89)
This is faulty logic, something happening “once” is not “proof” that it “often” happens.

… scientists might soon be able to build “matter lasers” that shoot out ultra-focused beams of atoms thousands of times more powerful than light lasers, or construct “super solid” ice cubes that can flow each other without losing their solidity. (293-4)

Theodore Rex

Theodore Rex
Author: Edmund Morris 2001 555 pp
My rating: 4*
Started September 14 2010, Finished October 2 2010

The second volume of Morris’ life of Theodore Roosevelt while highly enjoyable and informative did not impress me as much as the first. This book covers Roosevelt’s time as President and lacks the expansive feel of the first book which though it covers a much greater time span and contains about the same number of pages, felt more detailed. Theodore Rex does not quite give the reader the feeling that every noteworthy event of Roosevelt’s personal and professional life during the period covered was thoroughly explored. In particular this book seemed to stint on the personal life; I would have liked to know more about his family, in particular his daughter Alice. Nonetheless, Roosevelt still comes across as a sui generis physical and intellectual dynamo, making more recent presidents seem under-powered and ineffectual.

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After TR had Booker T Washington to dinner at the White House: “ … South Carolina Senator Benjamin J Tillman endorsed remedial genocide: ‘The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they will learn their place again.’” (55)

What held them together was their collective dedication to politics as a profession. Conscience, not corruption, kept the average senator in office. He worked seven days a week, assisted by one secretary and one typist, for five thousand dollars a year … (75)

After more blacks were greeted at the White House: “James K. Vardaman, running for Governor of Mississippi, went to the limits of public invective. Theodore Roosevelt was nothing but a “little, mean coon-flavored miscegenation’s”, while the White House had become “so saturated with odor of the nigger that the rats have taken refuge in the stable.” (203)

Henry Adams description of a White House dinner were TR, at the height of his powers, held forth: “We were straws in Niagara. Never have I had an hour of worse social malaise. We were overwhelmed in a torrent of oratory, and at last I heard only the repetition of I-I-I -- attached to indiscretions greater than one another … it is mortifying beyond even drunkenness.” (307)