Previously published: New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2001

Uncle Tungsten -- "37" -- Exile -- "An ideal metal" -- Light for the masses -- Land of stibnite -- Chemical recreations -- Stinks and bangs -- Housecalls -- Chemical language -- Humphry Davy: a poet-chemist -- Images -- Mr. Dalton's round bits of wood -- Lines of force -- Home life -- Mendeleev's garden -- Pocket spectroscope -- Cold fire -- Ma -- Penetrating rays -- Madame Curie's element -- Cannery row -- World set free -- Brilliant light -- End of the affair -- Afterword

Long before Oliver Sacks became a distinguished neurologist and bestselling writer, he was a small English boy fascinated by metals-also by chemical reactions (the louder and smellier the better), photography, squids and cuttlefish, H.G. Wells, and the periodic table. In this charming and eloquent memoir, the author chronicles his love affair with science and the magnificently odd and sometimes harrowing childhood in which that love affair unfolded. In Uncle Tungsten we meet Sacks' extraordinary family, from his surgeon mother, who introduces the fourteen-year-old Oliver to the art of human dissection, and his father, a family doctor who imbues in his son an early enthusiasm for housecalls, to his "Uncle Tungsten," whose factory produces tungsten-filament light bulbs. We follow the young Oliver as he is exiled at the age of six to a grim, sadistic boarding school to escape the London Blitz, and later watch as he sets about passionately reliving the exploits of his chemical heroes, in his own home laboratory