Disappearing spoons and waning interest

The Disappearing Spoon:

And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, 

and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements

 
by Sam Kean

Really detailed story of the "discovery" of the periodic table.  I quote "discovery" because of course it was a not a single discovery or even a final discovery.  We were taught in high school science class to believe in the table and assume that any new element discovered would be put quickly and easily in its place--and then we got to college and learned about quantum mechanics.

Better to think about it as the evolution of the periodic tables. Tables plural, because different ways of diagramming the chemicals show different ways in which they share similar properties or differ in interesting behaviors.

A book of this scope can't help but be fascinating, but it was a little overwhelming.  I haven't studied chemistry in over thirty years and have forgotten everything I every knew about it. His book seemed to skip around from topic to topic, future to past, chemical to chemical. I can imagine a different way of telling the story (with a lot of illustrations) that starts with the table in about 1960, explains what it meant and what it showed, and goes into considerable detail so you have a really good handle on it.  Only then can he go back in history to show how it got that way, and forward in history to show how it has moved on since then.