Book to Note

Joe Jackson. A World on Fire: A Heretic, an Aristocrat, and the Race to Discover Oxygen. New York: Viking, 2005. 414 pp. $27.95.

Reviewed by James J. Bohning

Yet another book on Priestley? The bold words on the dust jacket offer a justification: “The discovery of oxygen in the late 1700s changed human thought and history as radically as Copernicus’s astronomy, Newton’s apple, Darwin’s chimps, and Einstein’s Formulas.” That puts the discoverers Joseph Priestley (the heretic) and Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (the aristocrat) in some very lofty company. This engaging account begins with a legendary meal in Paris in October 1774: “as European thinkers grew drunk on the wine of enlightenment, two . . . dissimilar men of science faced one another across the table and plotted the end of ancient ways.” Priestley and Lavoisier, plotting? A World on Fire reads like a fiction novel with a twisting plot full of jealousies and intrigue, but it holds readers’ attention as it traces the scientific interplay that gave the world dephlogisticated air (aka oxygen) and recalls the cruel fates that awaited these men as they became engulfed by the fervors of their time. As Marie Lavoisier said, “You have to have lived under the vacuum pump to appreciate the luxury of breathing.”