Buy The Genie in the Bottle: 67 All-New Commentaries on the Fascinating Chemistry of Everyday Life

Over All Rating Reviews :

I am teach chemistry 110 and beginning lab classes for chemistry in our local community college. As my background is mainly in human biology and neuroscience, I've been boning up some on my chemistry, even though I took like ten chemistry classes. One thing I've noticed is especially in teaching three hour classes for chemistry, is the students tend to start going into daze mode about half way between. It ends up being too much scientific information given through textbooks too boringly. I've always used history of science to make things more interesting...for example, when we get into the making of the atom bomb, I tell them about the mission made into Norway in WWII to bomb the Nazi's only site of heavy water (Hydrogen with a neutron in the nucleus) to be used to make their own bombs. At least for the guys, this manages to perk things up...for the girls it is a little bit harder to find information that is relevant to them now and to their future jobs which for most of them will be nursing.

This book was recommended to me, and though it deserves a five for fun reading and good writing, it didn't have exactly what I was looking for. I think I had more in mind a book with the periodical chart of the chemicals and interesting stories going through the chart...that wasn't the case with this book. There are some stories I can use in there, especially on acetone, and I always use stories where doctors use themselves as guinea pigs, or stories of really stupid stunts done in the name of science just for a laugh. Schwarcz obviously has made a living out of collecting this stuff...I'm pretty sure I saw him either on PBS or Discovery channel once with some physicists who were doing things along the same line.

Science doesn't need to be mind-numbingly boring, yet so many teachers make it that way, even in college. In college so much emphasis is placed on the math, that the cool part of chemistry gets lost in the student's mind as they stumble through just trying to pass the tests. When that happens you know the students haven't learned a thing and are going to forget this stuff as soon as they leave the room. The bigwigs in education, at the NSF and the NIH wonder why American kids are doing poorly in science...well, the textbooks are often not only badly written...they often have wrong information, with wrong problems and wrong answers in them from proofreading done incorrectly. In the press to test, we leave out the necessary component of 'learning', and in order to learn, the information must be given in the right manner.

This book is definitely a keeper, and I will use it, and I am hoping I get guided to some more books more along the line I was looking for...

Karen sadler,
Science Education,
Pennsylvania

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