Phosphorus is highly toxic and flammable, forms compounds that explode on contact with oxygen, is the key ingredient in detergents and nerve gases, and is absolutely essential to life. It’s good fodder for what amounts to a biography of a chemical element, and John Emsley’s The 13th Element: The Sordid Tale of Murder, Fire, and Phosphorus is an excellent read.

Emsley focuses on four areas of phosphorus’ story: Its early history and manufacture, its valuable commercial uses, its less benevolent uses in explosives and chemical weapons, and its environmental reputation (not entirely deserved). The narrative is a bit clunky, and Emsley tends to veer off into list mode, rattling off a number of famous murder/poisoning cases involving phosphorus in one of the book’s later chapters, and one chapter seldom connects to the next. But most of the book is highly readable, with some of the more technical content siphoned off into sidebars, and it was news to me that phosphorus’s rap for causing eutrophication wasn’t entirely fair, and the history of phosphorus’ use in chemical weapons, including nerve gas, is sadly relevant today.

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