Volume 48, Number 17 · November 1, 2001
Growing Up Among the Elements
By M.F. Perutz
Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood
by Oliver Sacks
Knopf, 337 pp., $25.00
London's Science Museum in South Kensington was closed during the Second World War. When it reopened in 1945, the twelve-year-old Oliver Sacks discovered there the periodic table of the chemical elements. They were written in large letters on a wall, with samples of each element or one of its compounds attached to each name. That night Oliver could hardly sleep for excitement. To a boy who was already a keen amateur chemist, the revelation that the apparently disconnected properties of the elements could be fitted into a logical system gave the first sense of the power of the human mind. Sacks writes:
Review, 4186 words
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