The Periodic Kingdom: A Journey Into The Land Of The Chemical Elements (Science Masters Series) | 
| Author: P. W. Atkins
Publisher: Basic Books
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  19 reviews
Sales Rank: 30754
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 176
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.5
ISBN: 0465072666
Dewey Decimal Number: 541.24
EAN: 9780465072668
ASIN: 0465072666
Publication Date: May 1, 1997
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Condition: Good reading copy. May include highlighting/writing, some completed exercises, missing dust cover, crease, and/or overall wear. Ships within 2 business days. 100% Customer satisfaction guaranteed.
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Amazon.com
The periodic table of the elements is the grand, unified theory of chemistry. In The Periodic Kingdom, P. W. Atkins imagines the table as a landscape, with fields of metals, pools of mercury and bromine, clouds of gases, and the offshore island of rare earths. He describes the history of this metaphoric kingdom and shows how its laws are those of physical chemistry: they are the expression in the visible world of the invisible dance of subatomic particles. The Periodic Kingdom is an excellent book for students at any level who want to see the connections between chemistry, physics, and "real life."
Product Description
Come on a journey into the heart of matter—and enjoy the process!—as a brilliant scientist and entertaining tour guide takes you on a fascinating voyage through the Periodic Kingdom, the world of the elements. The periodic table, your map for this trip, is the most important concept in chemistry. It hangs in classrooms and labs throughout the world, providing support for students, suggesting new avenues of research for professionals, succinctly organizing the whole of chemistry. The one hundred or so elements listed in the table make up everything in the universe, from microscopic organisms to distant planets. Just how does the periodic table help us make sense of the world around us? Using vivid imagery, ingenious analogies, and liberal doses of humor P. W. Atkins answers this question. He shows us that the Periodic Kingdom is a systematic place. Detailing the geography, history and governing institutions of this imaginary landscape, he demonstrates how physical similarities can point to deeper affinities, and how the location of an element can be used to predict its properties. Here’s an opportunity to discover a rich kingdom of the imagination kingdom of which our own world is a manifestation.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 14 more reviews...
 Excellent concept, poorly executed May 21, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I very much agree with the review by Publishers Weekly, which stated that this book is "remarkably tedious." The concept of likening the periodic table of chemical elements to a landscape is near brilliant. It could have worked so wonderfully well, if only it had been better done. The author of this book was... at the time of its writing... a middle-aged British university professor, and he writes like you would expect him to talk. Wordy, wordy, wordy! It takes forever to dredge through the written material to get to a gleaming nugget of knowledge. It's rather like watching an English movie from the 1940s. Another glaring... REALLY obvious... deficiency of this book is the lack of adequate visual representations. There are a few black and white "maps" of the "landscape" of the periodic table, with the components thereof very poorly labeled. What this book needs is a quite thorough editing and modernizing by an American editor. It's sad that this book could have been so very much more than it is.
 A Great Introduction May 18, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
As someone who teaches first year undergraduate students about periodic trends and attempts to give them an underlying cause that isn't physical chemistry heavy, this book has been an excellent source of discussion fodder for me. I enjoyed reading it the first time, though it didn't present anyting new. What it did do, for which I am very grateful, is present the material in a different, and visualizable way - a way that can be modified to the classroom.
The metaphor gets a little heavy-handed towards the end, and at times I wished Atkins would lay off it a little, but this is likely due to my previous immersion in the material and not a problem with the book. Were it my first or second time through the material, or if I were a gen. chem. student struggling with the concept, I wouldn't feel so "let's get on with it" about it at all.
wonderful introduction to chemistry July 4, 2005
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
As a physicist, I have always felt I understood the basic concepts of atomic structure, the Bohr atom through the Dirac treatment of relativistic electrons and that was enough about chemistry that I needed to know. Of course, that was a very shortsighted point of view and did nothing for a practical understanding of how the elements interact. This book gives a wonderful introduction to just that topic. It starts off with an overview of how the basic properties of the elements vary, in a systematic way, across the periodic table. The books metaphor of a new land, makes it amazingly easy to remember these properties. Nothing else I've read has been as successful as conveying this. I would buy this book for the first four chapters alone. There are, of course, some problems with the book. For one, the author seems to have gotten a "new word a day" calendar and seems to feel the need to use them. ("Complexity can effloresce from subtly different consanguinity.") But fortunately, these are few and far between. Could a non-technical person read and enjoy this book? I have no idea but I would recommend they try.
 Extended Metaphor April 9, 2005
6 out of 7 found this review helpful
This book presents the very basics of the chemical elements and the organization of the periodic table. Atkins' unique approach is to present the material in the form of an analogy, or even an extended metaphor, with the chemical elements as a kingdom, complete with geographical regions, history, laws, and institutions. Along these lines, the book is divided into 3 parts: Geography, History, and Government and Institutions. At the end of the book are found a short list of items for further reading, an index, and a periodic table.
The geographical approach is quite appealing, but somehow falls short of its goal of making the material easily accessible to non-chemists. Describing the sections of the periodic table as having geographic correlates has a lot of explanatory potential. Unfortunately, the maps that are used to illustrate the concepts are presented in varying directions (sometimes from the North looking South, sometimes from the South looking North, etc.), but without directional symbols for orientation. Although orientational clues are generally provided in the captions, interpreting the maps is still far from easy, especially since the elements are not labeled. Readers who don't have a thorough familiarity with the periodic table will find it useful to study these maps with a periodic table in hand for comparison, hence the usefulness of the periodic table that is included at the back of the book. (Unfortunately, I never discovered this table until I had already read the book through, since it isn't referenced anywhere in the text.)
One reason I picked up this book is that I have always been fascinated with the organization of the elements in the period table. I know there are alternative forms for representing the organization of the elements, such as the 3-D Periodic Round Table, which shows continuities between sub-groups rather than simple column edges. I'd like to know more about why our usual 2-D periodic table is arranged the way it is, and what relationships are encoded in its presentation. Atkins touches on these subjects with both historical information and discussion of chemical properties and bonds. However, I found his prose often obtuse, and after reading the book, I'm still unclear about many of the key issues. It seems as though the metaphor of the elements as a kingdom sometimes gets pushed a bit too far and hinders rather than helps clarity. Nevertheless, the book does have some interesting sections and up-to-date information about basic chemistry.
Periodic Kingdom by Atkins January 18, 2004
6 out of 7 found this review helpful
This work covers the fine nuances of the Periodic Table of
elements from the East or p-block to the West s-block.
It describes how classic metals evolved. For instance, the
use of Cu. came out of the Stone Age. Iron, cobalt,
manganese and other metals were utilized to shape steel.
Dolomite is found in Italy and titanium in the West Desert.
This book would be very helpful in understanding how the
various metals and non-metals evolved. In addition, the permanent
position on the Table of Elements is explained.
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