World on Fire

Like Charles Seifes Zero and Dava Sobels Longitude, this passionate intellectual history is the story of the intersection of science and the human, in this case the rivals who discovered oxygen in the late 1700s. That breakthrough changed the world as radically as those of Newton and Darwin but was at first eclipsed by revolution and reaction. In chronicling the triumph and ruin of the English freethinker Joseph Priestley and the French nobleman Antoine Lavoisierthe former exiled, the latter executed on the guillotineA World on Fire illustrates the perilous place of science in an age of unreason.