Uncle Tungsten

In the life of a pre-pubescent boy, whatever happened to the simple pleasures of sports, chasing girls to pull their pigtails, or playing cowboys and Indians?

UNCLE TUNGSTEN is the childhood memoir of Oliver Sacks, who, as the son of two physicians in 1930s and 40s London, adopts more cerebral interests. Actually, let's call them obsessions, e.g., Mendeleev's Table of the Elements:

"I copied it into my exercise book and carried it everywhere ... I spent hours now, enchanted, totally absorbed, wandering, making discoveries, in the enchanted garden of Mendeleev."

Oliver's propensity for intellectual pursuits was further encouraged by his two maternal uncles, Dave and Abe, two scientist/business entrepreneurs, the former nicknamed UNCLE TUNGSTEN for his preoccupation with that element and his process for manufacturing tungsten light bulbs.

This engaging and instructive volume is the author's narrative of his life from age 6 to 15, beginning in 1939 at the beginning of WWII, when he was protectively sent out of London to a boarding school. Returning in 1943, he set up his own household lab and began experimenting with a vengeance, his chief interest being metals and their properties. The text is leavened with descriptions of his home life, his parents and brothers, and summaries of the achievements of giants in the field of Chemistry: John Dalton, Robert Boyle, the Curies, Antoine Lavoisier, Dmitri Mendeleev, Ernest Rutherford, Michael Faraday, and others. UNCLE TUNGSTEN is a short, popular history of the science.

I'm not awarding 5 stars because obsessions, especially someone else's, can become tiresome. Even Oliver's parents, responsible as any for his scientific curiosity, could be driven to distraction. At one point on a family auto trip, the young Sacks blathers on about one of his favorite elements for twenty minutes in the back seat until his father shouts, "Enough about thallium!"

By the age of 15, Oliver's preoccupation with chemistry began to ebb as the hormones of adolescence began to flow. The boy, becoming a young man, discovers music and sex. Those then around him should thank the Almighty for puberty; he was becoming an insufferable eccentric. He grew up to be a neurologist.


Not the book you expect   March 28, 2005
 7 out of 10 found this review helpful

This is a childhood memoir from Oliver Sacks.

I've been an admirer of Sacks for years: it's clear from his books that he has a scintillating intelligence which he applies indiscriminately, not just to medicine, but art, music, literature, philosophy, and sciences of all kinds.

I bought this book (early Christmas present to myself) to gain more insight into the man.

Three quarters of the book is a history of the development of chemistry, which Sacks had a passion for as a boy (aided by two of his uncles especially). This is all very well, and is told in Sacks' very readable style, but it leaves me wanting more background to Sacks himself. Reading through his other books (I have the lot) one sees only tantalising glimpses of the man behind the words: I had hoped this book might provide the personal information I had wanted. Sadly, I was disappointed.

Even sifting through what we get, there are some very disturbing glimpses into his childhood.

His mother (an obstetrician and professor of anatomy) would sometimes bring home malformed foetuses which had died at birth, or been drowned by her "like a kitten" shortly afterwards. These she encourages the (13-year old!) Sacks to dissect, and would teach him about anatomy all the while.

Later she arranges for him to dissect the body of a teenage girl at the local medical school under the supervision of "Professor G".

Sacks goes on holiday to the seaside with his family. He is given a large live octopus as a gift by a fisherman, and keeps it in the family bath, where he talks of how he feeds it live crabs and it changes colour because it seems to recognise him. The maid comes into the bathroom one day and kills the octopus with a broom handle in a panic. Sacks, of course, then dissects his beloved pet and keeps parts of it preserved in jars on his shelves for many years.

While it seems pretty clear that Sacks had a very precocious intellect, and was probably streets ahead of his peers in terms of intelligence, I find these incidents very disturbing.

The more I read Sacks, the more I think that perhaps there are unpleasant depths to his character that this book gives us only a hint of.

As a description of chemistry, this book is entertaining enough. As a glimpse into the life of Oliver Sacks, it is both inadequate and troubling.