Richard Morris is a successful science writer, with a number of books to his credit. He has an accessible style and, to judge from reviews of his other books, readers seem to like him. But I wasn’t impressed.

The theme of The Last Sorcerers is the search for the ultimate building blocks of matter. Morris tells his story via a series of gossip-column biographies, with an eclectic set of emphases—this book is not intended to be a reference work, and the author explicitly defers to other histories that “describe discoveries in great detail.” Typically, though, this leaves the reader wondering what really happened. Morris’ omissions could be excused as an understandably ruthless devotion to his theme, except that in the final chapters he describes discoveries in, well, “great detail”. These chapters deal with Morris’ first love, physics. I was forced to conclude that Morris does not have a feeling for the chemistry or alchemy in his stories. Unlike J. K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, Morris doesn’t even appear to know that the philosopher’s stone was, to Western alchemists, the principal ingredient in the elixir of life.

Morris’ apparently shallow background in chemistry is compounded with a Whiggish view of the history of science, a Voltairean condescension to the proponents of views later proved wrong. He is not kind to the alchemists and their intellectual successors such as Boyle and Newton, much less to the proponents of phlogiston. And he spends too much space on the alchemists as such, though he does try to tie them in with nuclear transmutation in his last chapters. Their stories do not fit well with his desire to tell about how our views of matter’s ultimate constituents developed.

The Last Sorcerers is a lot of little problems adding up to a poor book. Morris’ choice of the scientists to give space to is arbitrary. He writes without dash or verve; even that most swashbuckling of scientists, Paracelsus, is made to seem more like Richard Nixon than Errol Flynn. But his most egregious problem is sloppiness. To paraphrase Joseph Conrad, “The typos! The typos!”

One is not supposed to take issue with grammar and spelling in an “uncorrected proof copy,” but!! In an era of word-processing software with spelling and grammar checkers, there is no excuse for so many missing articles and flagrant misspellings. Worse, some of the typos—mistyped names and infelicities of a technical scientific nature—won’t be caught by a copy editor with a liberal arts background. While truly slovenly writing is evident only in parts of the text, if this were turned in by one of my students I would return it for corrections before I’d even bother to grade it. There seems little hope that all the editorial problems I noted will be corrected before publication; see the Amazon.com customer reviews of Morris’ recent book, The Evolutionists.

The list of suggested readings seems good and the content of the book is diverting, but I was underwhelmed by The Last Sorcerers. It’s a good concept done in by mediocre execution.