Inside the atom / Lists

This is another in the series of Abelard-Schuman science juveniles, and, like the others, is a book which I have always enjoyed from the days I first read it as a teenager.

Here Asimov gives us a quick overview of some of the major chemicals and families of chemicals made up solely of carbon (hence the title), hydrogen, and oxygen. As such, it is somewhat the equivalent of Building Blocks of the Universe, here centered on organic chemistry.

The book may be slightly overladen with footnotes, as Asimov stops to explain as much as possible—a habit he describes, by the way, in “The Sound of Panting” in Only a Trillion—but the overall tone remains light and clear, the book runs smoothly, and at its end the reader is left with a reasonably good grasp of some of the basics of the structure of organic compounds. It shows its age here and there, but remains nonetheless worthwhile for the non-chemist who wants to get some idea of how organic chemistry works.