HARVARD CLUB OF PRINCETON BOOK CLUB 

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 2

Date:              Monday November 2, 2026

Time:             7:00PM to 8:30PM Eastern

Location:        Private residence in Princeton area (address will be shared closer to meeting date)

Title:               Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood by Oliver Sacks  

Long before Oliver Sacks became the bestselling author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Awakenings, he was a small English boy fascinated by metals—also by chemical reactions (the louder and smellier the better), photography, squids and cuttlefish, H.G. Wells, and the periodic table. In this endlessly charming and eloquent memoir, Sacks chronicles his love affair with science and the magnificently odd and sometimes harrowing childhood in which that love affair unfolded.

In Uncle Tungsten we meet Sacks’ extraordinary family, from his surgeon mother (who introduces the fourteen-year-old Oliver to the art of human dissection) and his father, a family doctor who imbues in his son an early enthusiasm for housecalls, to his “Uncle Tungsten,” whose factory produces tungsten-filament lightbulbs. We follow the young Oliver as he is exiled at the age of six to a grim, sadistic boarding school to escape the London Blitz, and later watch as he sets about passionately reliving the exploits of his chemical heroes—in his own home laboratory. Uncle Tungsten is a crystalline view of a brilliant young mind springing to life, a story of growing up which is by turns elegiac, comic, and wistful, full of the electrifying joy of discovery.  (Amazon Book Description)

Click Here for Good Reads Review

Join us!

Would you like to suggest a book or location for a future Book Club meeting? 

Submit our suggestion form   https://forms.gle/GEdwhK7p7PRki8tu7  

Organizer:     Lindsey Kayman (lindsey.kayman@gmail.com) 

Cost:               $3.00 (for refreshments)

Tickets:          CLICK HERE TO REGISTER!!!  (Please email Lindsey if you register  and then are unable to attend)