Periodic Tales – Hugh Aldersey-Williams

This book came out of the author’s attempt to collect examples of all of the elements – not easy to do, by the way. What he writes about isn’t so much the chemical or physical properties of those elements, though that is covered, where it’s important to their discovery. What he does cover is the stories of who discovered them or why, or other interesting tidbits, like why a whole bunch of elements have names based on one Swedish mine. This is a cultural history of these elements, which it make it way more readable than you might expect from a quick synopsis.