Elemental - Tim James - 4 stars

[Robin P]

The full title is Elemental: How the Periodic Table Can Now Explain (Nearly) Everything. The author is a high-school teacher and he writes in an entertaining way to explain very basic chemistry to people of any age. He has some catchy anecdotes, puns and other jokes, as well as some simple illustrations. I didn't really follow the part about quantum physics, which relates to the behavior within atoms, but I wasn't trying very hard. I probably wouldn't have picked up this book except that it was on sale recently for .99 or 1.99 as an ebook and it worked for a challenge in another group as well as the tag.

I had chemistry in high school and I mainly remember there were a lot equations, and the experiments rarely came out the way they were supposed to.