A beautiful journey through history with an emotional touch.

We are told the stories behind the most important inventions through the personal lives of the discoverers and tales about the society they lived in.

A very engaging book!

This post is going to take a look at The Alchemy of Us written by Ainissa Ramirez. I received an eARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This book was released in April 2020, and I highly encourage you to get a copy and learn about everyday items we often take for granted in a new way!

It was really nice reading a nonfiction book for a change. I normally like to alternate between reading fiction and nonfiction to keep a decent balance between the two, but a majority of the eARCs I receive are fiction so sometimes I get off balance.

The Alchemy of Us discusses the importance of eight different inventions and how they changed the way humans interact with the world. Ramirez looks at clocks, steel rails, copper communication cables, photographic film, light bulbs, hard disks, scientific labware, and silicon chips. Ramirez's goal was not only to be informative, but to write in an entertaining way so that the material in the book is accessible to the readers, and doesn't scare them away like science classes often do.

The author did an excellent job of finding stories behind inventions that many might not have heard before. When I was in school I learned about how clocks helped with the Industrial Revolution, but I had never heard of the woman who sold time, or about how clocks affected our sleep patterns.

Not only does Ramirez do a good job teaching the reader about the invention in question in each chapter, but she also excels at bringing to light the unknown inventors behind these technologies. This includes highlighting the women and people of color that history often doesn't talk about. To be honest, I found these stories of the little known people behind these inventions even more interesting than the stories of the inventors that everyone knows the names of.

Happy reading :)

Ainissa Ramirez has written a fascinating book. Each chapter begins by looking at the need for a well-known invention, then at the steps leading to its creation, and finally, at the repercussions (both good and bad) the invention has had on 21st-century culture. It is a wonderful blending of history, science, and culture.

The book is very readable - written for a high school senior or the college-educated public. Anecdotes leading to the invention are interesting as they portray events less familiar than the invention itself. Details surrounding the invention expand on the facts most of us grew up learning. The author weaves stories of science, medicine, art, music, and literature, into the narrative as she explores the repercussions of each individual invention. A fun read.

My biggest concern is the style chosen by the author and publisher to present citations (at least as used in the ARC I was provided and as displayed on-line by Amazon). There are no footnotes or citations in the body of the text. An addendum to the book includes an extensive list of references. They are tied to the main text by quoting a four or five-word phrase just prior to each reference. These are not grouped by pages or by chapters - meaning that if the reader is looking for more information on a topic mention in the text, one will need to locate a quote from the passage that is also included in the list of references. It is all very inconvenient. This may be a valid way to create a list of citations, I found it confusing. Using Google was easier to trace references than using the addendum. It is this “flaw” that leads to a four-star review. NOTE: I do not have a copy of the published text. It may be that a better citation style was used in the final book.

Read the book - be prepared to consult Google to satisfy the curiosity it will generate.
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This review is based on a free electronic copy provided by the publisher for the purpose of creating this review. The opinions expressed are my own.

Slightly underwhelmed by this book, as it was more focused on individual inventions than expected, when I was hoping for more of a cohesive (and expansive) overview.

The impact of eight inventions are examined on (mostly US) society, and the author does a good job of showing how and why each invention arose and what problem it solved. these stories are fascinating and very well written and often have multicultural angles that I never knew about.

She's slightly less convincing when she attempts to show how each invention then changed us. For example, in the first section on time she discusses the way that accurate, regimented measurement of time led to change in our sleep habits from segmented sleep (where we slept for 5 hours or so, woke up in the middle of the night for an hour and then slept for another 4 to 5 hour period) to our current stay-up-late-get-up-early-for-work sleep. She uses the current prevalence of sleep disorders to suggest this change is a bad thing. But what's missing is any info or data on sleep quality in the past. there's some limited clinical evidence on segmented sleep, but do segmented sleepers have fewer or more sleep disorders than we do currently? Without information like this, the second half of the alchemy becomes less convincing.

On the whole, however, this was an engaging and interesting book.