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Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood
Uncle Tungsten Memories of a Chemical Boyhood Author:Oliver Sacks From his earliest days, Oliver Sacks, the distinguished neurologist who is also one of the most remarkable storytellers of our time, was irresistibly drawn to understanding the natural world. Born into a large family of doctors, metallurgists, chemists, physicists, and teachers, his curiosity was encouraged and abetted by aunts, uncles, parents,... more » and older brothers. But soon after his sixth birthday, the Second World War broke out and he was evacuated from London, as were hundreds of thousands of children, to escape the bombing. Exiled to a school that rivaled Dickens's grimmest, fed on a steady diet of turnips and beetroots, tormented by a sadistic headmaster, and allowed home only once in four years, he felt desolate and abandoned.
When he returned to London in 1943 at the age of ten, he was a changed, withdrawn boy, one who desperately needed order to make sense of his life. He was sustained by his secret passions: for numbers, for metals, and for finding patterns in the world around him. Under the tutelage of his "chemical" uncle, Uncle Tungsten, Sacks began to experiment with "the stinks and bangs" that almost define a first entry into chemistry: tossing sodium off a bridge to see it take fire in the water below; producing billowing clouds of noxious-smelling chemicals in his home lab. As his interests spread to investigations of batteries and bulbs, vacuum tubes and photography, he discovered his first great scientific heroes, men and women whose genius lay in understanding the hidden order of things and disclosing the forces that sustain and support the tangible world. There was Humphry Davy, the boyish chemist who delighted in sending flaming globules of metal shooting across his lab; Marie Curie, whose heroic efforts in isolating radium would ultimately lead to the unlocking of the secrets of the atom; and Dmitri Mendeleev, inventor of the periodic table, whose pursuit of the classification of elements unfolds like a detective story.
Uncle Tungsten vividly evokes a time when virtual reality had not yet displaced a hands-on knowledge of the world. It draws us into a journey of discovery that reveals, through the enchantment and wonder of a childhood passion, the birth of an extraordinary and original mind.« less
Oliver Sacks' autobiography leads us on a tour of the development of a "scientific" brain, from reminiscences of his large and quirky family in London to a Dickensian boarding school during the Blitz bombings to his awakening love of chemistry. It is part memoir, part paean to the symmetry and infinite beauty of science. Funny, sad, tragic and inspiring by turns, it reveals how Sacks became both a scientist and a caring human.
Sacks describes how his experiences as a boy were twined around a fascination with chemistry. His family members were deeply involved in science and his parents evem encouraged him to set up his own lab and recreate famous experiments - as well as his own. This book is full of the wonder of a child at the vivid world he discovered in his own magic garden. Along the way we learn a lot about the history of chemistry and discoveries. This isn't like any other autobiography I've read. It's not so much about the events and people in his world (although they are there) as about the workings of a young mind. I wish he had included more about how the inner illumination of a child's curiosity and rapture is transmuted at puberty, but his recounting of it is full of wonder.
I greatly enjoyed _The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat_, but this book, simply put, was too dull for me. I don't have an interest in chemistry so that alone should have stopped me from buying the book, but I thought that my interest in him, plus WWII London would be more than enough to interest me in this... unfortunately, WWII London serves as little more than a backdrop to a rather small portion of the book. And for all of the effort that he put into chemistry as a child, the end, it was a shock at the end the ease in which he abandoned it. I guess I really don't know how I feel about the book... some sections were just very slow moving for me and I didn't really have anything to relate to or a common interest in it. There were a few funny anecdotes, but not really enough. I even toyed with the idea of not finishing it for an hour or so. I am glad I finished it, but really, this is a book best suited for science buffs, not history buffs.
