UNCLE TUNGSTEN: MEMORIES OF A CHEMICAL BOYHOOD, by Oliver Sacks, Alfred A. Knopf, 2001, 337 pages, $25 (ISBN 0-375-40448-1)

CHEMICAL HEROES Sacks, in his favorite periodic table T-shirt, has a gallery of famous chemists and other scientists in his office. PHOTO BY PETER CUTTS

The genesis and many of the details of this book were related in a lengthy cover story in C&EN (Jan. 10, 2000, page 10; available online at http://pubs.acs.org/cen). For readers who missed that article, the book had its roots in a serendipitous encounter with Cornell University chemist and Nobel Laureate Roald Hoffmann. Sacks first contacted Hoffmann in 1993 after reading "Chemistry Imagined," a unique collaboration between Hoffmann and artist Vivian Torrence that consisted of 30 collages by Torrence paired with short essays, personal commentary, and poems about chemistry by Hoffmann. The book stirred some long-buried emotions in Sacks.

"I told Roald about my love for the periodic table and my desire to re-create the one I'd seen in the Science Museum in London at the end of World War II," Sacks relates. This cabinet with samples of the elements left an indelible impression on the 12-year-old boy.

Toward the end of 1997, Hoffmann sent Sacks a parcel containing a large poster of the periodic table with photographs of each element; a chemical catalog; and a little bar of tungsten which, Sacks writes in his book, fell "onto the floor as I opened the package, landing with a resonant clonk. I recognized it at once by its feel and its sound ('the sound of sintered tungsten,' my uncle used to say, 'nothing like it')."

That clonk, Sacks recalls, served as "a sort of Proustian mnemonic," and brought to mind his Uncle Dave, whom he called Uncle Tungsten, one of his mother's brothers who manufactured lightbulbs with filaments of fine tungsten wire and who instigated Sacks's love of chemistry. Sacks pictured "Uncle Tungsten ... sitting in his lab in his wing collar, his shirtsleeves rolled up, his hands black from powdered tungsten. Other pictures rose immediately in my mind: his factory where the lightbulbs were made, his collection of old lightbulbs, and heavy metals, and minerals."

So what started out as a brief sketch of Uncle Tungsten became first the New Yorker article and now this book, which is, appropriately, dedicated to Hoffmann.

Readers who enjoyed the New Yorker article and can't imagine that there could be anything more for Sacks to say will be surprised and gratified by this memoir. While it is true that Sacks retained much of the detail and nearly all of the sentences from the article, the memoir is much more thoroughly organized and detailed--and moving. It is also a breath of fresh air in a literary world dominated by often pretentious, self-absorbed celebrity autobiographies and memoirs.

Sacks is himself a celebrity--a noted practicing neurologist best known for books such as "Awakenings" (which became a movie) and "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat." Readers may already be aware of "Uncle Tungsten," as a number of newspapers have reviewed it, and Sacks himself, overcoming his "mother's shyness, her dread of social occasions," has been making the book circuit/talk show/newspaper interview tour to promote the memoir. There is really no contradiction here, since Sacks admits in the book that he also has his mother's "flamboyance, her exuberance in front of an audience, in equal measure."

In the book, Sacks has an opportunity to expound at great length on the historical figures who advanced chemistry, people such as Antoine Lavoisier, Humphry Davy, John Dalton, Dmitri Mendeleev, and Marie Curie, as well as a host of lesser known though no less deserving scientists such as Claude-Louis Berthollet, who was an ardent supporter of Lavoisier and a collaborator with him on nomenclature, and Lothar Meyer, who was one of several to use revised atomic weights to come up with a new classification of the periodic table.

Sacks spends considerable space relating fascinating details about these people and their stories both in his main text and in numerous footnotes. Thus the memoir becomes both a personal retelling of Sacks's experiences as well as a history of chemistry. If one wished to quibble at all with this book, it would be the perhaps overuse of footnotes, which often continue over more than one page.

Sacks adores footnotes, noting that his "own love of footnotes, the excursions they allow, was partly determined by reading Mendeleev's 'Principles of Chemistry.' " Mendeleev's book, Sacks points out in a footnote, grew "like a living thing in Mendeleev's lifetime, each edition larger, fuller, more mature than its predecessors, each filled with exuberating and spreading footnotes (footnotes which became so enormous that in the last editions they filled more pages than the text; indeed, some occupied nine-tenths of the page.") The problem for Sacks's reader is that one cannot skip these footnotes without doing serious damage to the content and continuity of the memoir.

Another aspect of the book not fully developed in the New Yorker article is Sacks's family life. These beautifully and elegantly written passages are the book's most moving. Sacks grew up in a Jewish household that was always filled with people, as his parents were both the offspring of large families. We are introduced not only to Uncle Tungsten but also to Aunt Birdie, Len, Dora, and Annie. Sacks re-creates family gatherings and interactions with his relatives with lavish and affectionate detail.

But not all was sunny in the Sacks household, and the passages about his older brother Michael's descent into madness are as terrifying as they are heartbreaking. In 1941, Michael went off to boarding school where he was "unmercifully bullied." Soon after the summer of 1943, Sacks writes, "Michael became psychotic. He felt a magical and malignant world was closing about him. ... I became terrified of him, for him, of the nightmare which was becoming reality for him, the more so as I could recognize similar thoughts and feelings in myself, even though they were hidden, locked up in my own depths."

Sacks sought solace in his chemistry lab, physics, and mineralogy to hold himself "together in the chaos." Meanwhile, he "closed the doors, closed my ears, against Michael's madness. ... It was not that I was indifferent to Michael; I felt a passionate sympathy for him, I half-knew what he was going through, but I had to keep a distance also, create my own world from the neutrality and beauty of nature, so that I would not be swept into the chaos, the madness, the seduction, of his."

"Uncle Tungsten" is informative and intellectual, satisfying and sobering, absorbing and amusing. It is also a beautiful book to hold and read, with exquisite typography. Both the dust jacket (shown on page 43) and the cover (which features a periodic table) are well designed. It is a perfect book to give to a scientist or nonscientist (including teenagers) as a holiday gift, but be sure to buy one for yourself. With its many engaging passages and historical detail, it is a book that will not gather dust on a shelf but rather be thumbed through and admired for many years to come.  

Madeleine Jacobs is editor-in-chief of Chemical & Engineering News and writes frequently about the connections between literature and science.

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