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Title: The Periodic Kingdom: A Journey Into The Land Of The Chemical Elements (Science Masters Series)
ISBN: 0465072666
Author:
P. W. Atkins
Publicate Date: 1997-05-01
Publish: 1997-05-01
List Price: $14.95
Average Customer Rating: 3.5
Format: Paperback
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $7.59
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $0.81
Amazon Merchant Price: $10.17
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| Customer Review: |
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1: The Most Annoying Chemistry Book, Ever!
Don't buy this book if you are looking for interesting facts, anecdotes, or history about the elements and the development of the periodic table. Oh, they might be in there, but they are completely obfuscated by the most protracted and stilted analogy I've ever encountered. The author starts with the proposal that the periodic table is a kingdom and then beats that analogy into submission for the next 160+ pages. Soon the reader has trouble figuring out what is real and what is some goofy idea presented by the author to make his "story" float. For example, in the first chapter the author presents a map of the "kingdom". Some areas have labels like "Halogens", "Alkali metals" while others are simply marked "Western Desert."
I teach high school chemistry, so I thought I would like this book. Sometimes I pick it up hoping I will find something interesting, but soon I drop it wishing the narrative was less "cutesy" and more straight forward. It's too bad, because there is obviously some good stuff in this book.
If there is an award for a book that can take interesting material and make it inaccessable and mundane, this book wins.
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2: Chemistry Via Geography
Peter Atkins has written a moderately interesting chemistry book for a generalist audience in which he explains the relationships between the elements of the periodic table in a pseudo-geographical method in which the periodical table is analogized to a map. I have had numerous collegiate chemistry courses, and while I personally found Atkins' approach occasionally unsatisfying, I can understand how someone new to chemistry would find the book interesting and useful.
Atkins strives long and hard to explain various characteristics of the elements (and later ionic and covalent bonding) via his geographical metaphor. I think his insight to write this book was utterly brilliant, but unfortunately the book is frequently troubled with extremely flowery and obfuscating prose, as well as a tendency to drift into tedium. The other major problem with the book is the lack of illustrations: for a book claiming relationships based on a graphical understanding of the relative positioning of elements, the almost total absence of illustrations is an obvious problem. To be completely fair, there a few black and white illustrations and a basic periodic table included, but the illustrations are inadequate, and few and far between.
Overall I found the book to be a quick and modestly enjoyable volume to read, but wish that the brilliant promise of the concept had been fulfilled more completely.
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3: Excellent concept, poorly executed
I agree with the review by Publishers Weekly, which stated that this book is "remarkably tedious." The concept of likening the periodic table of chemical elements to a landscape is near brilliant. It could have worked so wonderfully well, if only it had been better done. The author of this book was... at the time of its writing... a middle-aged British university professor, and he writes like you would expect him to talk. It takes forever to dredge through the written material to get to a gleaming nugget of knowledge. It's rather like watching an English movie from the 1940s. Another GLARING deficiency of this book is the lack of adequate visual representations. There are a few black and white line drawings of the "landscape" of the periodic table, with the components thereof very poorly labeled. What this book needs is a quite thorough editing and modernizing by an American editor. It's sad that this book could have been so very much more than it is. And it is not too late for that potential to be fulfilled. I hope against hope, that the publisher will update this book and thereby enable it to be the effective teaching tool that it could be.
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4: A Great Introduction
As someone who teaches first year undergraduate students about periodic trends and attempts to give them an underlying cause that isn't physical chemistry heavy, this book has been an excellent source of discussion fodder for me. I enjoyed reading it the first time, though it didn't present anyting new. What it did do, for which I am very grateful, is present the material in a different, and visualizable way - a way that can be modified to the classroom.
The metaphor gets a little heavy-handed towards the end, and at times I wished Atkins would lay off it a little, but this is likely due to my previous immersion in the material and not a problem with the book. Were it my first or second time through the material, or if I were a gen. chem. student struggling with the concept, I wouldn't feel so "let's get on with it" about it at all.
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5: wonderful introduction to chemistry
As a physicist, I have always felt I understood the basic concepts of atomic structure, the Bohr atom through the Dirac treatment of relativistic electrons and that was enough about chemistry that I needed to know. Of course, that was a very shortsighted point of view and did nothing for a practical understanding of how the elements interact. This book gives a wonderful introduction to just that topic. It starts off with an overview of how the basic properties of the elements vary, in a systematic way, across the periodic table. The books metaphor of a new land, makes it amazingly easy to remember these properties. Nothing else I've read has been as successful as conveying this. I would buy this book for the first four chapters alone. There are, of course, some problems with the book. For one, the author seems to have gotten a "new word a day" calendar and seems to feel the need to use them. ("Complexity can effloresce from subtly different consanguinity.") But fortunately, these are few and far between. Could a non-technical person read and enjoy this book? I have no idea but I would recommend they try.
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