#20 The Disappearing Spoon, Sam Kean
listened to this one as background noise while painting the wall and doing chores. its a collection of fun stories about the elements from the periodic table and the history of the table itself. has a nice balance of both recent history and stuff from the natural science days but has a typical level of disdain for alchemists and outdated ideas about the world. also a pretty clear american bias but thats to be expected.
i think i just dont care about popular science books... theyre easy to listen to passively while doing other things but theres such a tendency to turn history into soap operas with clear good and bad guys that it just doesnt feel like it properly describes the events that happened