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The Genie in the Bottle: 67 All-New Commentaries on the Fascinating Chemistry of Everyday Life
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Customer Reviews
Rating:  - Nice to know
This book contains more than five dozen articles each describing some chemical substance, how it was discovered and how it became useful. All interesting and many clearly explained. Each piece of knowledge, however, is encased long texts straining to be funny. Any trick, preferably cute, is acceptable if it seems it will make the reader smile. Thus, chapters with titles such as "Oil You Need to Know" or "Willow Power", little anecdotes, references to famous names, closely or not associated with subject at hand. So much extraneous material weighs heavily on the final text. If the reader is patient and has little else to do, this may the book, if he is also interested in chemistry.
Rating:  - Facinating stories on everyday chemistry
This is not a typical chemistry book. Dr. Schwarcz has several interesing stories such at the background of Thalidomide and the origin of the term "snake oil". About half the book is on food and health related topics. It's a fast read and should be interesting to anyone interested in science, health or history. The Dr. has his own radio show on science so the topics are designed to entertain a wide audience. The commentaries are short and make sense in any order. I liked is so much I'm planning on reading one of Dr. Schwarcz's other collections of commentaries.
Rating: - A brief but enjoyable walk through Chemistry
Here is a book for everyone who has a natural scientific curiosity - a well-written and entertaining look at the chemistry of everyday life. Dr. Schwarz has taken Chemistry, food and magic tricks and rolled them all together in order to create an entertaining read.
To name just a few of the topics covered.
While cooking peas- how can you make them more GREEN - and why does it work
The chemical benefits of flax seed oil
Why magicians can NOT bend things with thought power alone.
The history of Mercury poisoning
Why things are "hot" to taste and how this can be used against bugs
As you can see the list of topics is both broad and entertaining. Amazingly, Dr. Schwarz does not get us caught up in very in-depth chemical equations/reactions. This is book written for someone with scientific curiosity not necessary a Masters in Science!
I definitely recommend "The Genie in the Bottle" - and I also give it as an endorsement to be used as bed time stories to your children, for it is these types of short essays on chemistry that may spark the love of the sciences in your child!
Rating:  - Fun book, enjoyable book, but not relevant to my needs...
I am teach chemistry 110 and beginning lab classes for chemistry in our local community college. As my background is mainly in human biology and neuroscience, I've been boning up some on my chemistry, even though I took like ten chemistry classes. One thing I've noticed is especially in teaching three hour classes for chemistry, is the students tend to start going into daze mode about half way between. It ends up being too much scientific information given through textbooks too boringly. I've always used history of science to make things more interesting...for example, when we get into the making of the atom bomb, I tell them about the mission made into Norway in WWII to bomb the Nazi's only site of heavy water (Hydrogen with a neutron in the nucleus) to be used to make their own bombs. At least for the guys, this manages to perk things up...for the girls it is a little bit harder to find information that is relevant to them now and to their future jobs which for most of them will be nursing.
This book was recommended to me, and though it deserves a five for fun reading and good writing, it didn't have exactly what I was looking for. I think I had more in mind a book with the periodical chart of the chemicals and interesting stories going through the chart...that wasn't the case with this book. There are some stories I can use in there, especially on acetone, and I always use stories where doctors use themselves as guinea pigs, or stories of really stupid stunts done in the name of science just for a laugh. Schwarcz obviously has made a living out of collecting this stuff...I'm pretty sure I saw him either on PBS or Discovery channel once with some physicists who were doing things along the same line.
Science doesn't need to be mind-numbingly boring, yet so many teachers make it that way, even in college. In college so much emphasis is placed on the math, that the cool part of chemistry gets lost in the student's mind as they stumble through just trying to pass the tests. When that happens you know the students haven't learned a thing and are going to forget this stuff as soon as they leave the room. The bigwigs in education, at the NSF and the NIH wonder why American kids are doing poorly in science...well, the textbooks are often not only badly written...they often have wrong information, with wrong problems and wrong answers in them from proofreading done incorrectly. In the press to test, we leave out the necessary component of 'learning', and in order to learn, the information must be given in the right manner.
This book is definitely a keeper, and I will use it, and I am hoping I get guided to some more books more along the line I was looking for...
Karen sadler,
Science Education,
Pennsylvania
Rating: - For fun and useful information you can't beat Dr. Joe Schwarcz
If you would like to know what the things around you are made of, read Joe Schwarcz' entertaining books. He warns you of real hazards and make you laugh at our silly notions about every day things we all take for granted. Great for your junior high student. They might become scientists or engineers!
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