Uncle Tungsten; Memories of a Chemical Boyhood - Book 1

Uncle Tungsten; Memories of a Chemical Boyhood by Oliver W. Sacks is the fascinating and beautifully written memoir of Sacks' childhood passion for chemistry in London during and just after World War II.  Sacks comes from a huge extended Jewish family of scientists and doctors.  His own parents were doctors with their surgery in their own home, a large rambling Victorian mansion.  His many uncles and aunts were major influences on him.  And especially his Uncle Dave, affectionately know as Uncle Tungsten because he owned a factory that produced tungsten filaments for light bulbs. Sacks must have been a really gifted child.  His fascination started early with curiosity about the metals he saw in everyday life.  Trips to visit Uncle Tungsten's factory and deep wonderful conversations with his uncle about how tungsten and all the other elements came to be discovered completely captivated his imagination.  This blossoming love was interrupted by World War II when he and his older brother Michael were sent away from London to a horrible typically evil British boarding school in the country so the children would be 'safe.'  However, just like in Dickens and every other book about British boarding schools, the children were beaten and treated cruelly.  Sacks actually felt safer back in London during the bombing, the very few times he got to go home on holiday.

Even though Sacks' family sounds wonderfully smart and eccentric and he obviously loves his parents, they were curiously insensitive to a dysfunctional degree.  Sacks wound up being the very last student at his school, Braefield, because all the other students had complained about the cruelty.  For some reason Oliver never does.  Later, his brother Michael actually goes crazy from abuse and the parents never suspected anything.  Sacks even says at one point that it seemed to him his parents had more compassion for their patients than their own children.

After his very scarring years away from home during the war, he returns permanently to his London house where he eventually sets up his own chemistry laboratory.  He is enchanted by the heroic explorations and experimentations of early chemists and he seeks to  emulate them.  He has ready mentors in his Uncles Dave and Abe.  He has recourse to all kinds of chemicals, equipment and books.  He reads his parents' own chemistry textbooks.  He takes long bus rides to a chemical warehouse that he wanders around like a bookworm in a library.  This book is a walking advertisement for homeschooling.  He hated school and never mentions it once in a positive light except for the fact that he really thought learning Greek and Latin helped him and that in his high school (in London) he had a monomaniacal biology teacher who in spite of his many flaws managed to ignite a fascination with marine biology.  All his learning memories are about his own reading, his mentoring uncles and parents, his own explorations in his chemistry lab, his visits to the museums and factories.  Sacks even says at the very end of the book when he is beginning to lose his passion for chemistry and move on to other things:

Now at school I was forced to sit in classes, to take notes and exams, to use textbooks that were flat, impersonal, deadly.  What had been fun, delight, when I did it my own way became an aversion, an ordeal, when I had to do it in order.  What had been a holy subject for me, full of poetry, was being rendered prosaic, profane.

This book is chock full of detailed chemistry and the history of science, much of which I am sure went right over my head.  But still Sacks conveys with such lovely nuance how spellbound he was by the mysteries and wonders of chemistry, that even I, who am so very incapable of thinking like a chemist, feel a deep appreciation for what this science really is and what joy it gave him as a young boy growing up in wartime.  It made me want to learn chemistry even though I have always been terrified by it.

I really appreciated Sacks' storytelling abilities because he could make very scientific concepts and complex details engaging and sensible to even me, an ignorant reader.  There were a couple of times though where the book really disturbed me, but these were about his otherwise charming family.  Once he talks about his two oldest brothers, who were quite a good bit older than he.  They got a deferment during the war because they were med students at the time.  These brothers were as brilliant as any of the brilliant members of this family were.  One had a gift for music and the other languages.  They had pursued these passions before the war, however, after the war for some reason they felt they couldn't continue their interests because of their medical school demands.  I got peeved at this thinking of all the sacrifices that millions made and suffered during this war.  These were two young Jewish men who did not have to go fight Hitler and his minions and yet they are sad because of some illusory idea that they could only be doctors and not pursue their avocations.  Huh?  Count your blessings, boys!  How about those who suffered horribly, were in concentration camps, gassed, and all those who experienced the many terrors of war and deprivation in ways you never did.  Heck, these enemies were trying to exterminate your own people!  (Sacks' parents were Zionists who sometimes helped fleeing Jewish refugees).  I don't know.  It was the way Sacks wrote it that smacked of superiority and a kind of an insensitive self-importance that bothered me.

The other disturbing thing is again the deep insensitivity his mother had.  She was fascinated with anatomy and surgery.  She had no clue as to how traumatized Oliver was by the war and death.  She would bring home babies who had died or had been born so deformed that she 'quickly drowned them like kittens."  She told her son she did this which completely freaked him out.  She had also told him that when he was a baby she'd been afraid his skull wasn't developing properly and that he'd be deformed.  Of course as a child this really traumatized him.  Then when he was 14 she had him go to the medical school to dissect a corpse!!!  He had done some dissections of worms and frogs  (and once his own pet octopus murdered by a maid at the seaside hotel) before but this was a person!  And it turned out to be a girl his own age.  He was given a leg to dissect!  It took him a month and while he did learn much, he was also completely horrified by the whole thing as well.  Sacks did love his mother and she had much that was good about her, but something was definitely amiss too.  And when Oliver talks about his father, he does so in warm terms, except that he goes chapters and chapters without even mentioning him.  The uncles get far more attention.   At times Sacks talks about how his love of chemistry was really a form of escape from all the uncertainties and horrors he encountered in his childhood.

It seems to me this book would make a great living book for a high schooler learning chemistry.  There are a couple of references to burgeoning sexuality that I could have done without, but you could easily strike these few passages out. I was surprised to find no one had come up with a unit study approach to learning chemistry based on this book.  I guess we are too linear when teaching it now.  But really I think you could do a very thorough job of introducing chemistry and physics through this book.  For the first time in my life I think I might grasp what quanta are, so thank you Dr. Sacks!

Here is a really in depth analysis of the book I found by someone who also loved chemistry.

I actually bought and read parts of Uncle Tungsten years ago and have always wanted to revisit it and read it from cover to cover.  So I am very happy with myself for finally doing that and having it be my first book completed in 2015!

For more book reviews go to Read 52 Books in 52 Weeks.