Uncle Tungsten is a memoir by the neurologist and incomparable storyteller Oliver Sacks. Sacks describes growing up in London circa WWII in a lively, large, and highly intellectual family, including an uncle — Uncle Tungsten — who runs a light bulb factory. Indeed, Tungsten isn't the only maternal uncle with a chemical bent; seven other maternal uncles worked in the field of mineralogy! The memoir is a homage to chemistry, with the feel of elements and the smell of experiments swirling in a Proustian reverie of a time when well-to-do families could afford to have chemistry laboratories in their own homes.

Another endearing memoir of boyhood is My Family and Other Animals, in which the British naturalist and conservationist Gerald Durrell recounts his family's move from the rainy UK to sunny Corfu during the 1930s. There, the 10-year-old Durrell takes on the natural history of the island, securing a mentor who meets with him weekly to study the fauna he encounters and then bringing home terrapins and tortoises, birds and scorpions, indeed all manner of creatures to his tenderly and delightfully drawn family. Would that all of us could have had such an unfettered, exploratory childhood!

(SeniorWomen.com's Editor's Note: A most engaging accounting of this quirky but endearing family's adventure on Corfu. In addition to reading the book, we enjoyed viewing a Masterpiece Theater presentation and a DVD.)

I also recommend a pseudo-memoir, The Search, a first-person fictional account of one man's path in becoming a scientist. Writing in the early 1930s, C. P. Snow, himself a scientist-turned-author (who later gave the influential Rede Lecture in 1959 on the lack of communication between the arts and sciences), chronicles the intellectual, professional, and moral journey of his protagonist, Arthur Miles, a mirror for Snow himself. We meet Miles in the UK before WWI when he and his father look out at the night sky and young Arthur vows to become a scientist. He makes the decision to pursue chemistry, inspired by his high school teacher's enthusiasm for Niels Bohr and the newly described structure of the atom. Miles chooses the new field of X-ray crystallography for his life's work, first studying manganates, then later an unspecified biological problem. He plots out his career, jockeying to launch and lead a new institute and, ultimately, moving on from science altogether. I recommend this book because, even though the action takes place nearly a century ago, Snow, in the voice of Miles, eerily captures a passion, decision, discouragement, or dilemma that I myself have faced and probably you have, too. Graduate students take note: Miles's dearest lifelong friends are those he made in graduate school, and I think this will resonate for many readers.