Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood
Posted by admin | Posted in Neurology | Posted on 05-09-2010
5
Product Description
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, 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When he returned to London in 1943 at the age of ten, he was a changed, withdrawn boy, one who desperately needed order to make sense of his life.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.
Amazon.com Review
Oliver Sacks’s luminous memoir charts the growth of a mind. Born in 1933 into a family of formidably intelligent London Jews, he discovered the wonders of the physical sciences early from his parents and their flock of brilliant siblings, most notably “Uncle Tungsten” (real name, Dave), who “manufactured lightbulbs with filaments of fine tungsten wire.” Metals were the substances that first attracted young Oliver, and his descriptions of their colors, textures, and properties are as sensuous and romantic as an art lover’s rhapsodies over an Old Master. Seamlessly interwoven with his personal recollections is a masterful survey of scientific history, with emphasis on the great chemists like Robert Boyle, Antoine Lavoisier, and Humphry Davy (Sacks’s personal hero). Yet this is not a dry intellectual autobiography; his parents in particular, both doctors, are vividly sketched. His sociable father loved house calls and “was drawn to medicine because its practice was central in human society,” while his shy mother “had an intense feeling for structure … for her [medicine] was part of natural history and biology.” For young Oliver, unhappy at the brutal boarding school he was sent to during the war, and afraid that he would become mentally ill like his older brother, chemistry was a refuge in an uncertain world. He would outgrow his passion for metals and become a neurologist, but as readers of Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat know, he would never leave behind his conviction that science is a profoundly human endeavor. –Wendy Smith
Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood
email2friend
This book is so bad. It is not interesting at all. If you don’t have a chemical background, you will not understand it. Mr. Vincelette must die!
the end
Rating: 1 / 5
Unless you are REALLY, REALLY, REALLY interested in chemistry, this book will be a disappointment. How many sentences of the type: “If an element was compounded with nitrogen, phosphorus, or sulfur, it became a nitride, phosphide, a sulfide. If acids were formed, through the addition of oxygen, one might speak of nitric acid, phosphoric acid, sulfuric acid; and of the salts of these as nitrates, phosphates, and sulfates.” can you read before dozing off?
Rating: 1 / 5
I loved some of the science in Sack’s book but the autobiographical part was embarrassing at points.It seemed to me that it’s very hard to write this type of book with out sounding like you are bosting of your intelligence. One of the few book’s that did pull it off for me, where an intelligent boy tells of his growing up, was Bryce Courtenay The Power of One. In chapter 21 Sacks tells of reading Eve Curie’s biography of her mother and how it impressed him. He says “it was no dry recital of a life’s achievements, but full of evocative, poignant images” I only wish this book could have been that way for me. I guess I wanted a book that got to my heart like ‘Power of One’this book never came close.
Rating: 2 / 5
I can usually like a book if I try hard enough, but this one won’t even meet you halfway. Descriptions of colors, textures, properties of elements. Descriptions of the containers elements are often kept in. Sacks is clearly enthusiastic though, and I see he has succeeded in passing on his excitement to some other reviewers, but without any enticing hooks or surprises, the book only left me with that “hours of someone else’s vacation photos” feeling.
Rating: 1 / 5
This is a very bad book.
It was originally a (decent) magazine article, in The New Yorker; but it suffers dreadfully from being expanded to book length.
The way Dr. Sacks manages this feat of expansion is with page-after-unending-page discussing the history of Chemistry, of all things. Well, Chemistry, it turns out, was Dr. Sacks’ youthful passion. (My youthful passion was slot cars, but I hope my relatives put me in a home if I ever show an inclination to fill a book about that subject, under the guise of autobiography).
I suppose that if a reader happens to actually be interested in the history of Chemistry, one could do worse, but if one is fooled by the cover, and the other editorial reviews, one might think it is essentially an autobiography. It is not.
The shame of all this is that Dr. Sacks led an interesting life, in interesting times, but what we we learn of him and his times is only what we can pick up on the way to one more disquisition on Chemistry.
We learn, for example, that Dr. Sacks was packed off to boarding school, and didn’t like it, much. Why? Well, there was a nasty headmaster, and lousy food. That’s a pretty fair summation of Sacks’ coverage of THAT subject. On the way to another Chemical investigation, we learn a tiny bit about Sacks’ immediate family. Both his parents were Doctors. We could be told a little about the practice of medicine in England during the Second World War, but we are not. We could be told about relations between Jews and Gentiles in England, but we are not. We could be told about Sacks’ mother’s experiences as a female physician, but we are not.
While I, at least, am learning far too much about Lavoisier, Boyle, and Faraday, a schizophrenic brother of Sacks appears, and just as swiftly, disappears. What happened to him? We aren’t told. A relative dies, in his house. Of what? Some sort of congestive heart failure, but we aren’t specifically told much more about the disease, and all we know about the relative is barely enough to flesh out a 2-dimensional cutout of a real human being. Sacks furnishes a chemical laboratory in his parents house. He nearly poisons himself, and the parental response is a fume hood. A discussion of various theories of child-rearing might ensue, here, to good effect, but of course it does not.
Sacks seems to have an unending source of money (no doubt in the place of parental supervision) for a young lad, but we really don’t know. Is this how all youngsters grew up, in England, before the war? Did Sacks notice that other children did not have the wherewithal to furnish a chemical laboratory? We. Don’t. Know.
Finally, and I mean, finally, the book ends with Sacks going off to medical school. He breezily explains the preceeding 300-or-so pages enthusiastically proclaiming the virtues of Chemistry as some sort of youthful divagation. But there is an intimation that it was his parents who made the decision that the young Dr. Sacks would go to medical school. But again, we really know nothing, because we are told nothing.
We are told that the unexamined life is not worth living. If this is Dr Sacks’ idea of an examined life, I feel truly sorry for him.
Rating: 1 / 5