Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.50 (670 Votes) |
| Asin | : | B005UJSDBY |
| Format Type | : | |
| Number of Pages | : | 556 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2013-09-18 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
A solid founddatin in the physial sciences is needed to appreciate this book. Almost sixty years ago, I entered the Graduate School at the University of Pennsylvania to study for a Ph.D. in chemistry. There I had the opportunity to be a Lecture Demonstrator for an old-fashioned professor who believed that the basis for introductory chemistry courses be directed towards "descriptive chemistry" which was rapidly becoming out of vogue. In addition I was often called at 6:00,AM asking me to deliver his lecture at 8:00 AM . II learned more chemistry then than in any class I had taken before or since. Therefore Uncle Tungsten was pleasant visit down memory lane.I c. I appreciate chemistry a lot more as a result of this book Andrew Wu I'd read my local library's copy first and was immediately engrossed. For the longest time, chemistry as a subject and a science had mystified, confounded, and frustrated me. While I had a good chemistry teacher in high school and enjoyed live demos, I never did understand what the periodic table of the elements actually meant, or why the elements were arranged in the sequence they were, or what was so significant about chemistry. Instead, I was generally more attracted to physics which seemed more readily graspable to me (in terms of basic concepts).Dr. Sacks' love of chemistry eas. I just love this book because of the way Dr NGS I used to have a copy of this book, lent it out, so just recently purchased the paperback version, and am about halfway through it (having read it several times in bygone days). I just love this book because of the way Dr. Sacks is so enthusiastic about all the things he comes across in daily life and learning when growing up. He had many mentors, both inside and outside of his family, and they seemed to know how to pique his interest. I didn't know much about chemicals before reading this book, and can't say I retain a lot of the chemical experiments that were done, but it was the
We follow the young Oliver as he is exiled at the age of six to a grim, sadistic boarding school to escape the London Blitz, and later watch as he sets about passionately reliving the exploits of his "chemical heroes" in his own home laboratory. In this endlessly charming and eloquent memoir, the author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Awakenings chronicles his love affair with science and the magnificently odd and sometimes harrowing childhood in which that love affair unfolded. Wells, and the periodic table. Long before Oliver Sacks became a distinguished neurologist and best-selling writer, he was a small English boy fascinated by metals - also by chemical reactions (the louder and smellier the better), photography, squids and cuttlefish, H.G. In Uncle Tungsten we meet Sacks' extraordinary family, from his surgeon mother (who introduces the 14-year-old Oliver to the art of human dissection) and his father, a family doctor who imbues in his son an early enthusiasm for housecalls, to his "Uncle Tungsten", whose factory produces tungsten-filament lightbulbs. Uncle Tungsten is a crystalline view of a brilliant young mind springing to life, a story of growing up which is by turns elegiac, comic, and wistful, full of the electrifying joy of discovery.