A World on Fire : A Heretic, an Aristocrat, and the Race to Discover Oxygen Hardcover - 2005

by Joe Jackson

In the final decades of the 1700s, as the threat of revolution began to dim the radiance of the Enlightenment, two brilliant scientists simultaneously achieved a breakthrough that would alter the course of human thought and history: they discovered oxygen. The humble English dissenter Joseph Priestley and the French aristocrat Antoine Lavoisier were unlikely competitors, but their fierce rivalry to solve the 'riddle of air' became a kind of eighteenth-century space race, a contest made all the more exciting by the tumult of their time.

In A World on Fire, acclaimed writer Joe Jackson brings to life the seismic intellectual and political shifts that ushered in modern science. Set against the conflagrations of the American Revolution, the storming of the Bastille, and the Reign of Terror, Jackson's narrative deftly weaves together biography and history, scientific passion and political will. With their discoveries inside the laboratory paving the way for the identification of the elements as well as modern atomic physics and the tragedy of their downfalls, Priestley and Lavoisier epitomize the plight of the scientist in the modern age. With A World on Fire, Jackson has transformed their story into a spellbinding work of narrative nonfiction.