The Disappearing Spoon Study Guide

Sam Kean was born in Sioux Falls, South Dakota and is very proud of his hometown. Kean earned a bachelor’s degree in English and physics at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities and a master’s degree in library science at Catholic University of America. The Disappearing Spoon is his first book and it was both a critical and commercial success. It became a bestseller and was nominated by the Royal Society as one of the top 10 science books of 2010. Kean’s other books similarly focus on making science accessible to a general audience, often by using entertaining and unexpected stories from the history of science. Along with Kean’s four books, he writes for magazines such as The Atlantic and The New York Times Magazine. He also regularly appears on the radio and gives guest lectures across the world. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Many historical events are covered in the novel, beginning with what is arguably the very first historical event—the Big Bang. Kean traces the history of the universe, along with our galaxy and solar system, detailing how Earth and the other planets were formed. He also provides an account of the speculation around how the dinosaurs died out. Jumping ahead in time, Kean mentions scenes from Ancient Greece, such as the Spartans’ (largely unsuccessful) attempt to use chemical weapons against the Athenians. He also considers how Plato’s theory of the forms relates to the contemporary scientific understanding of the elements. The majority of the book, however, focuses on the period between the Age of the Enlightenment and the present—particularly from the 19th century onwards, as this is when the periodic table was devised. Key historical events that the book covers within this period include the Australian gold rush, the discovery of DNA, and the Manhattan Project, in which the first nuclear bomb was developed.

Only one year after the publication of The Disappearing Spoon, another popular science book focusing on the periodic table of elements was also published. This one, Hugh Aldersey-Williams’s Periodic Tales: A Cultural History of the Elements, from Arsenic to Zinc, also provides information about the elements through quirky, unexpected facts and historical narratives. Other popular science books about the periodic table include Tim James’s Elemental: How the Periodic Table Can Explain (Nearly) Everything and James M. Russell’s Elementary: The Periodic Table Explained. Looking more broadly, many other books cover science and its history for a lay audience. These include Richard Holmes’s The Age of Wonder, which chronicles the boom of scientific research in the 18th and 19th centuries; Carl Sagan’s Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, which accompanied the famous TV series of the same name; and Richard Rhodes’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which focuses on some of the same material that appears in The Disappearing Spoon.