The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements Book

My GR friend Jason writes sturdy and trustworthy reviews, but I must take exception with him here :

The Disappearing Spoon is quick, light reading out in the sun. It handles complex theory in a comfortable, approachable way.

Yes, it is all that, IF such stuff as this makes sense to you :

The strongest solo acid is still the boron-based carborane (HCB11C111) And this boron acid has the best punchline so far : it's simultaneously the world's strongest and gentlest acid. To wrap your head around that, remember that acids split into positive and negative parts. In carborane's case you get H+ and an elaborate cagelike structure formed by everything else (CB11C111-) With most acids it's the negative portion that's corrosive and caustic and eats through the skin. But the boron cage forms one of the most stable molecules ever invented. Its boron atoms share electrons so generously that it practically becomes helium, and it won't go around ripping electrons from other atoms, the usual cause of acidic carnage.

Well, this could be part of the rules of Quidditch for all the sense it makes to poor general reader me, so I think The Disappearing Spoon is really for science geeks who think stuff about German chemists being hornswoggled out of a Nobel Prize for Alchemy by some Californian sharpies in 1951 or a neat account of the crucial properties of the biomolecule which are called handedness is the very thing for those moments on the beach when there isn't any eye candy around.