Upon opening The Art of Chemistry my inclination was to flip through the pages looking at the illustrations and reading the figure captions. Even in this cursory perusal, I was intrigued by a few images, such as Madame Lavoisier’s drawing “of her husband conducting respiration experiments on his assistant Armand Seguin, completely enveloped in a rubber suit” (p 186), but most had little visual interest. It is not clear why Greenberg includes reproductions of so many title pages to chemical textbooks except that he clearly delights in owning them.

The actual text of The Art of Chemistry is a series of exegetical commentaries linked to a loosely chronological hodgepodge of images. A miscellany of excruciating chemical detail, quips and asides, and random historical connections, the commentaries provide quite a wild ride. At times this approach left me confused, as though I had jumped sideways into the middle of a story (I am still not sure what the “Modern cladistic display of phylogenetic relationships among selective clams” (p 140) has to do with crystal structures). At other times, however, Greenberg uses his narrative technique to good effect, as in the section “The Humble Gift of Charcoal”, which ties together the molecular structure of carbon monoxide, Strum’s late 19th-century painting “The Alchemist”, and phlogiston (pp 133–134).

As I read, I found myself trying to determine the organizational principle of the text. I concluded, as I moved in fits and starts through chemical history, that the author followed privately formed connections. Certainly, this method of writing history could be viewed as smartly subversive, undermining the cultural narrative of science moving ever forward, but this intention is never articulated. Thus, Greenberg’s presentation of alchemy, for example, provides an improbable approach to the history of chemistry. Typically authors of chemical history treat alchemy quite separately from the rest of chemistry. Indeed, the distancing of alchemy from chemistry has been central to the writing of chemical history since its disciplinary foundations in the 18th century. In contrast, Greenberg juxtaposes alchemical and chemical images in such a way that he positions alchemical thought as a legitimate precursor to revolutionary chemical concepts. In the absence of an articulated agenda for subverting the received connections between alchemy and chemistry, this inference is unconvincing.

As a chemical history, The Art of Chemistry is somewhat derivative; indeed, a glance at the references for many of the essays reveals that Greenberg relies heavily on Partington’s 1962 A History of Chemistry. It is also quite old fashioned in its reporting of history, taking a notably non-interpretative and “objective” stance that favors the telling of anecdotes about chemists and chemical rivalries (for example Lavoisier vs. Priestley on phlogiston). This kind of historicization has an inherent interest, but unfortunately many of Greenberg’s anecdotes bog down in chemical minutiae. This tendency is most pronounced in section VI on American chemistry in which he focuses on chemists who are unknown, uncontroversial, and inconsequential in their chemical contributions.

By contrast, Greenberg’s use of famous historical personalities that are not normally associated with chemistry is instructive. I really enjoyed his section on Herbert Hoover’s translation of Agricola’s 1556 De Re Metallica and his examination of Benjamin Franklin’s interest in gunpowder. I also enjoyed reading the epilogue that includes two personal essays by the author—one on the late Robert Silberlied, a boyhood friend of Greenberg’s and a “quirky and ingenious butterfly collector” who became a renowned entomologist; the other explores Greenberg’s own chemical genealogy that links him, among others, to Justus Liebig and Gabrielle Fallopio, the 16th century author of Observationes anatomicae. These essays were insightful and entertaining, although the first would have been better as a prologue.

Finally, in “Some Fun”, the last section of the book, Greenberg reproduces images that apparently did not fit in elsewhere and that are possibly the most interesting in the book. Among the best are the early 20th-century chemical trading cards that depict “chemical laboratories and famous chemists” (pp 312–315). With these, Greenberg captures the joy of collecting chemical images, a joy that he attempts throughout the book to communicate—and the images really are “some fun.”