Lajos Kovács, Dezső Csupor, Gábor Lente, Tamás Gunda
100 Chemical Myths: Misconceptions, Misunderstandings, Explanations
Springer, 2014
This is a science book, but one which should be relatively intelligible to the intelligent layman. It deals with popular, yet largely untrue, misconceptions and misunderstandings about the chemistry in our lives: food, medicine, the environment and industrial process.
The explanations are relatively concise (few are more than three or so pages) and seek to cut through fallacies and urban legends. Because of their concision the explanations are not highly technical, although some basic knowledge of chemistry or basic science will help.
So far, so good. However I found this an intensely irritating read on a number of levels.
Each of the short explanations is self contained, although copiously cross-referenced and with a section of sources and references in the back-matter. Nevertheless the refutations are stated often with little in the way of logical reasoning or explanation; just bald statements which sounded like “we now know that …” or even “we deny it”. Because of this, and the lack of technical detail, I found the explanations often superficial and unsatisfying.
This isn’t helped by the poor illustrations. Although relatively well illustrated the graphics vary between being too small, pointless and lacking helpful captions. The authors do rather assume that one either knows what a chemical structure means, or one is happy to gloss over it, which I find intensely irritating — even as a trained chemist some memory joggers would be helpful.
I also did not find this book a comfortable read. The language is clunky. In a way this isn’t surprising as the authors, and thus the original text, are Hungarian. But the translation doesn’t flow: too often the sentence structure is obtuse; and there are too many instances of just the wrong word being used — it is clear what the meaning is but an inappropriate synonym has been used. In fact the English feels like a machine translation which hasn’t been checked by a native English speaker for flow and sense.
The book was also physically uncomfortable. It isn’t a cheap book and is from a major scientific publishing house; the paper and the binding are good. Nevertheless the production feels like a print on demand product: the board cover has a laminated glossy illustration, rather than a dust jacket, and very sharp corners which made reading in bed rather uncomfortable.
So yes, that’s right, I was not impressed. The book might have been marginally acceptable as a sub-£10 paperback, but for £45 (from Amazon) it is not of the quality — of content or production — expected.
Overall Rating: ★☆☆☆☆