I am probably like a lot of people in that everything I learned about the periodic table, I learned in the span of a single year at the age of 15, and I had forgotten the vast majority of that three months later. This book didn't exactly make up for my lifetime of neglect of this subject, but I must give it a lot of credit. I was plenty entertained, I learned a lot (much of which I promise I have already forgotten even as I type this), and I was rarely lost on any concepts the author tried to convey. In short, this short book was probably every bit as successful in teaching me basic chemistry as my year in 10th Grade, and at much smaller taxpayer expense.

In fact, one of my more distinct memories from 10th Grade chemistry was the occasional stare I'd give the periodic table and the realization that while we had learned some of the basics (atomic numbers, masses, number of electrons), the class plodded along slowly enough that some of its features (the placement of the lanthanides, for example) remained a mystery. This easy read really filled those gaps, but happily as a secondary motivation. Its primary concern is to tell stories, mostly involving history and many involving scientists, and it generally pitches the stuff you could get from the Wikipedia entry for the periodic table at moments in-between.

Spoiler alert! Here are some cool things I learned (or re-learned). This will give you a feel for how ignorant I was going in, and the sort of joyful topics this volume covers:

* Electrons drive the periodic table. The elements that share a column tend to take on similar characteristics in part because they have the same number of unpaired electrons, and consequently are likely to pair with other elements (to form compounds) with the same amount of vigor. So you have "peaceful" noble gases (argon, helium) not far from the "poisoner's corridor", which is next to radioactive poisons. But from there, it's still amazing how the complexity builds. "Just as you could never guess, unless you'd seen it, that individual carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen atoms could run together into something as useful as an amino acid, you'd have no idea that a few amino acids could fold themselves into all the proteins that run a living being."

* There are a lot of wild stories about scientists, a lot of which is about seeking personal glory, and a lot of which is about feeding massive egos. A guy I never heard of, Fritz Haber, was both the father of chemical warfare for his work developing and deploying chlorine and mustard gases during World War I, as well as the man responsible for the technology to create ammonia, the precursor to all fertilizers, which is largely responsible for the global population explosion in the 20th century. (There is probably a lesson in morals in there someplace.) Then there is the guy who missed a press conference for his Nobel Prize in Physics because he couldn't figure out how to get his new electric garage door to open.

* Peppermint (menthol) tricks your mouth because it seizes up cold receptors. Copper is used in most coins because it neutralizes most bacteria or fungi (without hurting us). Titanium, for some unknown reason, triggers zero immune system response and even cons the body's bone-forming cells into attaching themselves to it, which is why all implanted teeth and replacement hips are made of the stuff. Iodine was first added to salt (as a cheap and easy measure to prevent birth defects and mental retardation) in the early 1900s. Helium and neon have never bonded with another element. Aluminum, abundant in the earth's crust but rarely found in a pure form, used to be extremely difficult to extract from oxygen, until a process was identified in 1888 dropping the metal from $550/pound to $18/pound in seven years, and 25 cents per pound five decades later. Elements also don't simply come in gaseous, solid, liquid, and plasma form, but can rather come in multiple crystallized forms, such as chocolate's chalky color change following a temperature shift (a phenomenon Robert Scott's failed Antarctica expedition suffered from because it stored fuel in tin, which leaked due to a change in solid form). Monte Carlo simulations came out of the Los Alamos nuclear testing experiments. Shark teeth litter the ocean floor because they're about the hardest biological substance known, the only part that survives.

And the universe is 99.96 percent hydrogen and helium. We, being composed of vastly different materials, are the happy result of ancient supernova explosions. And we write nifty books to crow about how we know this.