The Disappearing Spoon

1 About this book

The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements, is a 2010 book by science reporter Sam Kean. The book was first published in hardback on July 12, 2010, through Little, Brown and Company and was released in paperback on June 6, 2011, through Little, Brown and Company's imprint Back Bay Books.

The book focuses on the history of the periodic table by way of short stories showing how a number of chemical elements affected their discoverers, for either good or bad. People discussed in the book include the physicist and chemist Marie Curie, whose discovery of radium almost ruined her career; the writer Mark Twain, whose short story "Sold to Satan" featured a devil who was made of radium and wore a suit made of polonium; and the theoretical physicist Maria Goeppert-Mayer, who earned a Nobel Prize in Physics for her groundbreaking work, yet continually faced opposition owing to her sex.

Summary adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Good for readers who want: history and science.

• History
• Science
• Chemistry