Mendeleyev's Dream: The Quest For the Elements by Strathern, Paul - 2000

Hamish Hamilton, 2000 8vo (20.5 cm), X, 309 pp. Publisher's cloth and dust jacket. "In this elegant and entertaining book, the award-winning novelist and expositor of difficult ideas, Paul Strathern unravels the history of chemistry through the dramatic quest for the elements. Framing this history is the life story of the 19th Century Russian scientist Dmitri Mendeleyev, who fell asleep at his desk and awoke having dreamed the periodic table--the template upon which modern chemistry is founded, and the event which marked chemistry's coming of age as a science." (publisher's synopsis)