Nature's Building Blocks: An A-Z Guide to the Elements by John Emsley

From Barnes & Noble

Most people don't have fond memories of the periodic table from high school science classes, but here one of the best popularizers of the subject has filled his book with so many entertaining tidbits that he's in danger of starting a new fad for chemistry trivia. Take this one: When a piece of indium metal is bent, it lets out a high-pitched shriek.

From the Publisher

What is the most common element in the universe? Can you name the noble gases? Everything we see around us is made of chemical elements, but most of us know little about them.
Penned by award-winning science writer John Emsley, Nature's Building Blocks explains the what, why and wherefore of the chemical elements. Arranged alphabetically, from Actinium to Zirconium, it is a complete guide to all 115 of those that are currently known, with more extensive coverage of those elements we encounter in our everyday life. The entry on each element reveals where it came from, what role it may have in the human body, and the foods that contain it. There are also sections on its discovery, its part in human health or illness, the uses and misuses to which it is put, and its environmental role. Readers discover that the Earth consists of around 90 elements, some of which are abundant, such as the silicon and oxygen of rocks and soils, while some are so rare that they make gold seem cheap. Our own bodies contain about 30 elements, some in abundance, some in trace amounts; some vital to our health, and some that are positively harmful. A list of the main scientific data, and outline properties, are given for every element and each section ends with an "Element of Surprise," which highlights some unexpected way in which each element influences our everyday life.
Both a reliable reference source and a high browsable account of the elements, Nature's Building Blocks offers a pleasurable tour of the very essence of our material world.

San Francisco Chronicle

From actinium to zirconium, Emsley marshals the details into a well-organized, user-friendly reference about every little thing that makes up every big thing that makes up the universe as we know it ... A quite useful and even fascinating book in its own way, a lot of fun to flip through during idle moments.

New York Times Book Review

John Emsley's colorful account of all the elements in the universe is a succinct history of everything... Emsley drew on 20 years of collected magazine and newspaper articles to produce this marvelous reference work. 'Nature's Building Blocks' is the kind of book people consult in the pursuit of a single fact, but this fact will lead to another and another, drawing the reader in an enjoyable chase from naturally occurring nuclear reactors to human zinc deficiency and on to the number of elements named for one small town in Sweden (four).

Science News

From actinium to zirconium, this marvelous encyclopedia details all 115 elements of the periodic table to reveal the nature of each and its relationship to us. With the general reader in mind, Emsley infuses his text with lots of quirky tidbits of information.

What People Are Saying

Nature
"This is a fine, amusing and quirky book … to be browsed and savored in idle moments."

Oliver Sacks
"A marvel-encyclopedic in scope, but so full of enthusiasm, so engagingly written, that one can open it at any point and read for sheer delight. It is Dr. Emsley's new book which will now sit next to me on my desk."

Product Details

• Table of Contents
• Interviews & Essays

Table of Contents

Interviews & Essays

Who doesn't enjoy watching fireworks? Noisy, exciting, colorful. It seems hard to imagine today, but once upon a time people used to make their own fireworks. When I went to school it was still possible to buy the essential ingredients: saltpeter (potassium nitrate), sulfur, charcoal, and iron filings, and my friends and I experimented with them. Of course the fireworks we made were not very impressive -- a fizz and a few yellow sparks were all we produced -- and the reason was that we knew no chemistry.

When eventually I was taught chemistry at school, things became much clearer, and the more chemistry I learned, the more interested I became. So what is it about fireworks that make them such a good advertisement for the chemical elements? The most obvious link between them is that three of the traditional ingredients (sulfur, charcoal, and iron filings) are simply pure chemical elements, as is magnesium powder, which is used to create a brilliant white flame. But if you want color, then you need to know a little more about some of the other chemical elements, such as strontium, whose compounds burn with a bright red flame; or barium and copper, which burn green; or sodium, which can color flames a bright yellow.

And blue? No element burns with a purely blue flame, and if you attend a firework show you might notice how few of the bursts of stars that light up the sky are blue in color. Indeed, one of the skills of a practiced firework maker is to produce a blue display, and it is done by a careful combination of other colors, which are blended so as to appear blue.

We now know of 114 chemical elements, although only 85 or so are to be found on Earth, and it's from these that everything we see around us is made. About a dozen of them are used in firework manufacture. Even more are needed to create a human being, and while there are at least a few atoms of 90 elements in our bodies (and that includes gold and uranium), most are not essential to life and are simply there because there are minute traces of them in the foods we eat. Nevertheless, 25 elements are vital, and that goes for cobalt (the metal we normally associate with the pigment cobalt blue used by artists), chromium (of chrome plating), and nickel (used in coins and stainless steel), although the amounts of these in our bodies are tiny.

A lifelong career in chemistry has led me to collect all kinds of interesting facts about the chemical elements, and these I have turned into the book Nature's Building Blocks. In it I tell the fascinating story of each element, under headings such as cosmic element, human element, food element, medical element, historical element, economic element, element of war, environmental element, and, or course, chemical element. And at the end of each section I include an "element of surprise," with a fact so surprising that I felt it needed special note.

For example, we think of uranium as a modern element, essential for generating nuclear power and atomic bombs. Yet 2,000 years ago, in the time of Christ and the Roman Empire, a workman who made the tiles for mosaic floors used a uranium pigment to color some of them a fluorescent green. Where he got his uranium from we will never know, and those who stood on the floors of villas he decorated with his mosaics were happily unaware that the wonderful new color they so admired was giving them a daily dose of radiation! (John Emsley)