Periodic Tales
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  • Published: 27 April 2012
  • ISBN: 9780141041452
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 464
  • RRP: $27.99

Periodic Tales

The Curious Lives of the Elements

Formats & editions
EBook
30 May 2011
Audiobook
21 Jun 2018
Paperback
27 Apr 2012
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The phenomenal Sunday Times bestseller packed with fascinating stories and unexpected information about the building blocks of our universe

Everything in the universe is made of them, including you.

Like you, the elements have personalities, attitudes, talents, shortcomings, stories rich with meaning.

Here you'll meet iron that rains from the heavens and noble gases that light the way to vice. You'll learn how lead can tell your future while zinc may one day line your coffin. You'll discover what connects the bones in your body with the Whitehouse in Washington, the glow of a streetlamp with the salt on your dinner table.

Unlocking their astonishing secrets and colourful pasts, Periodic Tales is a voyage of wonder and discovery, showing that their stories are our stories, and their lives are inextricable from our own.
  • Published: 27 April 2012
  • ISBN: 9780141041452
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 464
  • RRP: $27.99
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About the authors

Hugh Aldersley-Williams

Hugh Aldersey-Williams is a writer and curator with interests ranging from science to architecture and design. His prolific career as a freelance journalist included a five-year stint as the design critic of the New Statesman.
He has written a number of books on design, as well as The Most Beautiful Molecule (1994), the story of the Nobel Prize-winning discovery of buckminsterfullerene, a molecular form of the element carbon.
More recently, he is the author of Findings: Hidden Stories in First-Hand Accounts of Scientific Discovery, and the curator of two exhibitions at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Zoomorphic: New Animal Architecture and Touch Me: Design and Sensation.
He lives in Norfolk with his wife, son and two Maine coon cats.