Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

I don’t like science, I don’t like nonfiction, but I loooove Georgia Hardstark

The Disappearing Spoon and Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements by Sam Kean

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Georgia from My Favorite Murder recommended Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time, which is one of my favorite books in my CBR history. So when she recommended a book about the history of the periodic table of the elements, I decided to check it out despite its non-fictionness. I was expecting stories that just happened to tie in elements, but this is straight up history. Who discovered which elements, how they did it, how those elements are used today, who won which Nobel Prize, and so […]

If you don’t love science yet, Sam Kean will win you over

The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: The History of the Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Drama, Madness, and Recovery by Sam Kean

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CBR12 BINGO: Gateway Sam Kean is my favorite science writer, and his books don’t get any better than The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons. I’ve previously reviewed The Disappearing Spoon and Caesar’s Last Breath for CBR, but I decided to re-read The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons because it’s a perfect “gateway” book into both Kean’s work and popular science. Plus, I’ve had a hankering lately to read some brain stuff. The title refers to a pair of doctors who tended to King Henri II of France after […]

DNA and Genes Broken Down

The Violinist's Thumb by Sam Kean

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Bingo Square: Science! I quite enjoyed Same Kean’s previous book, The Disappearing Spoon, so I am not entirely sure why it took me so long to get around to reading this – The Violinist’s Thumb was published in summer 2012 and I have a hardcover, so I’ve obviously had it for a while.  I will say, at least part of the blame goes to the fact that around 2014/2015 I transitioned to primarily reading Kindle books so it hasn’t helped diminish the stack of physical […]

If Sam Kean had been around when I went to school, I might have majored in Science

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I’m not sure at what point in my adult life I decided I love science, but if I had been able to read books by Sam Kean when I was in school, I might have come to this conclusion at a much younger age. Then again, I think the interest has always been there (at one point I thought I would be a zoologist, because I liked animals), but the knowledge didn’t seem accessible to me. Whether it was because I was a girl and […]

Come for the Science; Stay for the End Notes

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Sam Kean is my favorite science writer, for a few reasons. For one thing, he is a complete mad man about research. In chapter 2 of The Disappearing Spoon, Kean records the longest word in the English language. This champion of all English verbiage turns out to be a word that describes a protein on the first virus ever discovered and measures 1185 letters. (I’m not going to record it here because proofing that shit would take up the rest of my day.) What impresses […]



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