In the life of a pre-pubescent boy, whatever happened to the simple pleasures of sports, chasing girls to pull their pigtails, or playing cowboys and Indians?

UNCLE TUNGSTEN is the childhood memoir of Oliver Sacks, who, as the son of two physicians in 1930s and 40s London, adopts more cerebral interests. Actually, let's call them obsessions, e.g., Mendeleev's Table of the Elements:

"I copied it into my exercise book and carried it everywhere ... I spent hours now, enchanted, totally absorbed, wandering, making discoveries, in the enchanted garden of Mendeleev."

Oliver's propensity for intellectual pursuits was further encouraged by his two maternal uncles, Dave and Abe, two scientist/business entrepreneurs, the former nicknamed UNCLE TUNGSTEN for his preoccupation with that element and his process for manufacturing tungsten light bulbs.

This engaging and instructive volume is the author's narrative of his life from age 6 to 15, beginning in 1939 at the beginning of WWII, when he was protectively sent out of London to a boarding school. Returning in 1943, he set up his own household lab and began experimenting with a vengeance, his chief interest being metals and their properties. The text is leavened with descriptions of his home life, his parents and brothers, and summaries of the achievements of giants in the field of Chemistry: John Dalton, Robert Boyle, the Curies, Antoine Lavoisier, Dmitri Mendeleev, Ernest Rutherford, Michael Faraday, and others. UNCLE TUNGSTEN is a short, popular history of the science.

I'm not awarding 5 stars because obsessions, especially someone else's, can become tiresome. Even Oliver's parents, responsible as any for his scientific curiosity, could be driven to distraction. At one point on a family auto trip, the young Sacks blathers on about one of his favorite elements for twenty minutes in the back seat until his father shouts, "Enough about thallium!"

By the age of 15, Oliver's preoccupation with chemistry began to ebb as the hormones of adolescence began to flow. The boy, becoming a young man, discovers music and sex. Those then around him should thank the Almighty for puberty; he was becoming an insufferable eccentric. He grew up to be a neurologist.

I've been an admirer of Sacks for years: it's clear from his books that he has a scintillating intelligence which he applies indiscriminately, not just to medicine, but art, music, literature, philosophy, and sciences of all kinds.

I bought this book (early Christmas present to myself) to gain more insight into the man.

Three quarters of the book is a history of the development of chemistry, which Sacks had a passion for as a boy (aided by two of his uncles especially). This is all very well, and is told in Sacks' very readable style, but it leaves me wanting more background to Sacks himself. Reading through his other books (I have the lot) one sees only tantalising glimpses of the man behind the words: I had hoped this book might provide the personal information I had wanted. Sadly, I was disappointed.

Even sifting through what we get, there are some very disturbing glimpses into his childhood.

His mother (an obstetrician and professor of anatomy) would sometimes bring home malformed foetuses which had died at birth, or been drowned by her "like a kitten" shortly afterwards. These she encourages the (13-year old!) Sacks to dissect, and would teach him about anatomy all the while.

Later she arranges for him to dissect the body of a teenage girl at the local medical school under the supervision of "Professor G".

Sacks goes on holiday to the seaside with his family. He is given a large live octopus as a gift by a fisherman, and keeps it in the family bath, where he talks of how he feeds it live crabs and it changes colour because it seems to recognise him. The maid comes into the bathroom one day and kills the octopus with a broom handle in a panic. Sacks, of course, then dissects his beloved pet and keeps parts of it preserved in jars on his shelves for many years.

While it seems pretty clear that Sacks had a very precocious intellect, and was probably streets ahead of his peers in terms of intelligence, I find these incidents very disturbing.

The more I read Sacks, the more I think that perhaps there are unpleasant depths to his character that this book gives us only a hint of.

As a description of chemistry, this book is entertaining enough. As a glimpse into the life of Oliver Sacks, it is both inadequate and troubling.

Sacks' quest for knowledge mainly focussed on chemical elements and compounds, with metals dominating his attention. "Uncle Tungsten" [his uncle Dave] owned a lamp factory and provided both advice and materials. Sacks drew heavily on his expertise, but Dave often left him to experiment on his own. With a highly inquisitive mind and a drive to learn, Oliver often duplicated the research performed by notable figures of science to achieve the same ends. This technique provided great insight into the scientific method, allowing him to manufacture chemicals that might have been purchased at a nearby shop.

He learns the scientists' techniques through the blizzard of printed paper he plowed through during those years. Biographies, autobiographies, published journals and notebooks, all were his reading fare throughout his boyhood. He reminds us of the hazards of research from the burned hands and faces from potassium to the still-radioactive notebooks of Marie Curie, today stored in lead boxes. Setting up a laboratory in a back room of the family home, he followed their reasoning, their sense of discovery, and their techniques as he made bangs, smells, brilliant lights and beautiful crystals. His biological endeavours were often less successful. He and his chums once drove the inhabitants of a house away for months until the noxious odour of rotting cuttlefish could be exorcised.

Although Sacks introduces a wealth of scientific information from a broad sweep of sources, there is not a dull page in this book. He describes the techniques to isolate elements in vivid detail, and you find yourself sharing the researcher's frustration to achieve the goal along with the exhilaration when success is achieved. You follow Sacks willingly as he plods through the museums and into shops buying chemicals. Mostly, you watch him as he begs Uncle Dave for materials or sits spellbound as "Uncle Tungsten" describes the properties of metals. Sacks' joys at "re-learning" what others have done is infectious - he leaves you longing to repeat the experiments for yourself - only to learn, of course, that today's caution has sequestered the materials away to prevent you blundering into harm. That's a sad testimony, but Sacks' journey through time and place remains for us to gain some sense of what it must be like to undertake scientific adventures. Every schoolchild should be in possession of this book as parents encourage them to "investigate and interrogate". [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]