Book: Mendeleyev's Dream

This book is very similar to this one that I have written about before. I think the biggest difference is that Mendeleyev's Dream does a better job in explaining how periodic table formed and the author writes about fewer chemists throughout the history.

The quote in the beginning of the book is fascinating:

"The chemists are a strange class of mortals, impelled by an almost insane impulse to seek their pleasures amid smoke and vapour, soot and flame, poisons and poverty; yet among all these evils I seem to live so sweetly that may I die if I were to change places with the Persian king."

— Johann Joachim Becher,   Physica subterranea (1667)