The chemical promise Book

This is a very good book. It not only made me understand the shift from alchemy to chemistry, the search for elements and the more or less bizarre people involved in both but also what is the trouble with most popularized accounts that claim to be about the history of science. Strathern is both a historian and a scientist. Most other authors are only half historians and half scientists, at least when they set out to write their books which turn out to be more or less sloppy products.

Strathern is anything but sloppy. He injects something to his account that is rarely seen these days: wisdom. He is able to situate himself in a person's life in its historical context without making a fuss about it. That approach results in delightful and insightful passages as this:

"Fortunately [Mendeleyev's] wife proved an imaginative and resourceful woman. She wisely chose to spend her time on the estate at Tver, except when her husband arrived there from St Petersburg, when she and the children would depart from the Mendeleyev town residence. In this way the marriage managed to survive, without the cohabitation which is the ruin of so many relationships."

Now that Imitation Game about Alan Turing is still in the theatres, the reader appreciates all the more what singular characters it takes to make significant advances in science or any other human endeavour for that matter. The French chemists Lavoisier was the only one that Strathern portrayed as normal but he makes much of the fact that that did not spare Lavoisier from the guillotine. Ironically, the judge sent him to his death by saying that the revolution does not need scientists.