An engaging chemistry lesson that also serves as an encyclopedia to understanding the world around us.
A chemistry professor teaches “the stories your chemistry teachers wouldn’t tell you” through short, accessible lessons on drugs, deadly household items, mysteries of ordinary objects, and more.
Debut author Farmer (Chemistry/Sonoma State Univ.) devoted his life to chemistry after a high school friend on LSD jumped in front of a car and was killed instantly. He was driven by a quest to better understand hallucinogens and their effect on the brain, but he also wanted answers to other questions that haunted his childhood. When Farmer became a chemistry instructor, he noticed that he would regularly stump his classroom when he asked a question that provides the title of a subsection here: “What Substance is Used to Make 80% of All Pharmaceuticals?” (The answer: petroleum.) His shock regarding how little the general public knows about chemistry led him to write this book. In it, he does go into drug-related topics, such as how methamphetamines act as a stimulant, but also addresses much more than just chemical extremes. The first chapter introduces basic chemistry concepts, such as atoms, molecules, and neurotransmitters. The following chapters each cover an overarching theme, such as “The Poisons in Everyday Things,” which breaks down into specific lessons: “How Can Visine Kill You?” “Death by BENGAY,” “Deadly Helium Balloons,” and others, and ends with a list of materials for further reading. Each lesson is no more than a few pages long and successfully shows how relevant chemistry is in everyday life. In the seventh chapter, “Why Junior Mints Are Shiny and Other Weird Facts about Your Food,” Farmer explains why it’s hard to remove gum from the soles of shoes by describing what causes strong intermolecular forces. The lessons include images of molecular structures; others include funny cartoons, such as an elephant balancing on a pencil to represent graphene’s strength. The short sections and accessible language will keep readers’ attention, and the frequent addition of molecular structures could be a useful addition to chemistry courses.
An engaging chemistry lesson that also serves as an encyclopedia to understanding the world around us.Pub Date: July 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-119-26526-9
Page Count: 326
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: Nov. 29, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A fascinating chapter in earliest American history, and an example of how far-reaching the ramifications of federal law can...
A gripping account of the discovery and subsequent controversy that surrounded Kennewick Man, a 9,500-year-old skeleton found in the Pacific Northwest.
Anthropologist and forensic consultant Chatters was minding the shop in 1996 when the Benton County coroner came calling with a skull discovered in the nearby Columbia River in Washington state. Although the formation of the jaw and brow suggested to Chatters that the skull was that of a Caucasian (perhaps an early settler in the region who died a century ago), there was a puzzle in the form of an arrowhead (a projectile of a type that’s been out of use for many thousands of years) lodged in the skeleton’s pelvis. Radiocarbon dating revealed the astounding age of the bones; Kennewick Man was one of the most complete skeletons ever discovered from such a remote period. However, his age put him square in the middle of a controversy. Was Kennewick Man, a Caucasoid skeleton not traceable to any existing tribe, subject to the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act? If so, he would have to be reburied immediately, with no further scientific examinations. As Chatters relates the case, it is a striking example of how bureaucracy can be manipulated—in this case, by the Army Corps of Engineers and the local tribes who seized and held the skeleton, exhausting deadline after deadline for performing its own studies. After four years of delay, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbit found for the tribes, at which point Chatters and eight other scientists sued for the right to examine the skeleton (this “ancient American fossil that even the government’s own experts admit needs to be studied”) before its reburial. Chatters, with true scientific curiosity, then moves into headier subject matter, advancing theories of how Kennewick Man came to be in the Americas, what his society might have been like, and what the projectile in his pelvis might suggest about human conflict in a remote age often painted as idyllic.
A fascinating chapter in earliest American history, and an example of how far-reaching the ramifications of federal law can be.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-684-85936-X
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
Policy, popular culture, and genetics meet in this intelligent critique of our society's search for easy answers. Genetic essentialism is on the rise, contend Nelkin (Sociology/New York Univ.; The Creation Controversy, 1982, etc.) and Lindee (Sociology of Science/Univ. of Pennsylvania; Suffering Made Real, not reviewed). They argue convincingly that while the science of genetics doesn't offer conclusive biological information, it is shaping us culturally and being used to justify conservative social policy: If everything from intelligence and sexual orientation to alcoholism and violence is inherited, then problems can be controlled, ``not through the uncertain route of social reform, but through biological manipulation.'' The authors' assessment of genetics' dangerous social potential may sound like Orwellian alarmism, but they draw on solidly familiar examples from American popular culture, including television, movies, books, and the media (they cite, for instance, a TV movie, Tainted Blood, that posits homicidal tendencies being passed from mother to child). The book is also impressively up-to-date on the political front, bringing health insurance, adoption surrogacy, welfare reform, and concern about the family into the picture. This broad range of examples reflects the gene's remarkable currency—a power gained, Nelkin and Lindee claim, by the malleability of its potential. Culturally, the gene is conceived as everything from the computer chip of personal identity to the ``secular equivalent of the Christian soul.'' These assumptions bear frightening resemblance to the beliefs of the American eugenics movement in the early 1900s, say the authors, who point to a reemergence of social intolerance and blame. An important, timely commentary on the manipulation of scientific inquiry in the interest of political ideology.
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-7167-2709-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
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