Usually the first approach to a book is guided by reading the title, it will be wrong, but if I don't like it, I hardly go further. Luckily I was with my wife in the library. She bought the book and it was she, after reading it, who intrigued me, reading some interesting passages aloud. So I also read it and I must say it was a pleasant discovery.
The author, Joe Schwarcz, is a professor of chemistry at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.
What is it about, you may ask. It is not the classic chemistry book, difficult and sometimes boring to follow, but an interesting journey through the chemistry that surrounds us in our everyday life. Chemistry and its history intertwine amiably, leading the reader to discover chemistry and men together, protagonists of the discoveries.
Often the discoveries, especially in the pharmaceutical field, have happened by chance, as well as by chance the secondary, sometimes benevolent, sometimes bad, effects of the active ingredients and their interactions with other natural substances have been discovered.
When we read the booklet of a drug we hardly find any kind of indications, "beware, do not take with grapefruit juice", yet grapefruit juice possesses substances able to increase the effectiveness of some drugs used to treat hypertension. Of course it could also be dangerous if you are not careful. Each substance, in fact, if taken in the right dose can do well, but if the doses are wrong ...
A short time ago I had a heart attack and have been under care since then. One of my daily medicines is aspirin. I would never have thought that the use of blood thinner aspirin was discovered by chance by a Californian family doctor, Dr. Lawrence Craven, who noted that his patients took chewin-gum from aspirin to relieve pain. of tonsillectomy, often suffered from hemorrhage. It was he who thought of using aspirin to avoid blood clots in patients who had suffered heart attacks.
History is also among my interests. When I studied the Balfour Declaration of the 1917 (with which the British Government had said it was available to settle the Jews in Palestine) I would never have thought that this declaration had been made out of gratitude to a Jew (the chemist Chaim Weizmann) who while searching a method to produce isoprene discovered how to produce acetone from the fruit of the horse-chestnut, acetone which was used by the British factories to produce the cordite needed for war.
These curiosities and many others, told in great detail, are an integral part of the book that I advise you to read.
I'm undecided, if I follow my instincts about the titles, and not buy the other books of the author or make an exception and buy "How to crumble a cookie?" ...
I still have not decided, for now, good reading to everyone.
Alessandro Rugolo
