Chemistry A Very Short Introduction Peter Atkins 2015

PrefaceI hope to open your eyes and show you a fascinating, intellectually and economically important world, that of chemistry. Chemistry, I have to admit, has an unhappy reputation. People remember it from their schooldays as a subject that was largely incomprehensible, fact-rich but understanding-poor, smelly, and so far removed from the real world of events and pleasures that there seemed little point in coming to terms with its grubby concepts, spells, recipes, and rules. In later life that unhappy reputation is often rendered unhappier still by an awareness of the environmental impact of nasty chemicals escaping into the wild and bringing disaster to softly green clover-clad bucolic meadows that were home to the glowing poppy and the dancing butterfly, rendering into inhospitable mud the banks where the wild thyme once grew, generating toxic sludge and noxious slime where limpid streams had rippled, replacing air fragrant with aeolian delight with pungency, and generally messing things up.