The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements » (Unabridged 10 CDs, 12 hrs)

Sam Kean is a writer in Washington, D.C. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Mental Floss, Slate, The Believer, Air & Space, Science, and The New Scientist. He is currently working as a reporter at Science magazine and as a 2009 Middlebury Environmental Journalism fellow.

The infectious tales and astounding details in The Disappearing Spoon follow carbon, neon, silicon, and gold as they play out their parts in human history, finance, mythology, war, the arts, poison, and the lives of the frequently mad scientists who discovered them.

The Barnes & Noble Review

Kean's book has the structure of a Christmas tree. The trunk is a history of the classification of the elements, an effort that begins in the nineteenth century.

The ornaments on this Christmas tree are the people and personalities behind the chemistry and physics. The usual suspects are here, like Marie Curie (and her radioactive journey to the discovery of polonium and radium) and William Shockley (who is credited, not exactly justly, with the discovery of the silicon transistor). Kean also tells good stories of more obscure characters like Paul Emile François Lecoq de Boisbaudran, whose discovery of gallium, a metal with a low melting point, gives this book its title: a spoon made of gallium will disappear in a cup of tea. [...] The Disappearing Spoon is bedecked with such intriguing and edifying accounts.