A World on Fire: A Heretic, an Aristocrat, and the Race to Discover Oxygen - Hardcover

Jackson, Joe

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670034347 ISBN 13: 9780670034345

Publisher: Viking Adult, 2005

Synopsis

Traces the breakthrough discovery of oxygen at the end of the 1700s by a pair of rival scientists, describing how English dissenter Joseph Priestley and French aristocrat Antoine Lavoisier waged a fierce competition to solve the "riddle of air" in spite of such historical challenges as the American Revolution and the storming of the Bastille. 25,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author:

Joe Jackson is the author of one novel and three nonfiction titles, including Leavenworth Train, which was a finalist for the 2002 Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime. He worked for twelve years as an investigative reporter for the Virginian-Pilot, covering criminal justice and the stateĀ’s death row.

From Booklist:

*Starred Review* In the shared riddle of the "pure air" that allowed enclosed mice to live and covered candles to flame high, Jackson locates the thread linking the lives of a Frenchman who lost his life because of his ties to the ancien regime and that of an Englishman who lost his home because of his support for new ecclesiastical and political liberties. Ironically, the English champion of new theological and political ideas stubbornly clung to an outmoded science in trying to explain the substance he had isolated, while it was the French aristocrat who formulated the revolutionary new concepts that explained that strange substance. Jackson deftly recounts both the scientific triumphs and political tragedies that define the lives of Joseph Priestley and Antoine Lavoisier. Readers see--procedure by procedure--the experiments that turned a bit of mercuric oxide and one brilliant candle into a puzzling riddle for Priestley, and they witness the intellectual daring of Lavoisier in solving that riddle by repeating the British researcher's work with quantitative precision and a theoretically lucid new nomenclature. But readers also see the piquant personalities and turbulent social circumstances behind the science: a man so solicitous of his fellow creatures that he tries to revive suffocated mice is himself despoiled by mobs who regard him as a dangerous monster; a man who adheres to truth so assiduously that he measures it grain by painstaking grain falls victim to Jacobins who see in him a cheat and liar. A probing composite portrait of two martyrs for science. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About this edition

• Publisher: Viking Adult
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0670034347
• ISBN 13: 9780670034345
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 414