The funniest, most accessible book on rocket science is being reissued

Enlarge / On Jan. 10, 2013, the Saturn V F-1 gas generator completed a 20-second hot-fire test. Engineers are completing a series of tests at Test Stand 116 located in the East Test Area at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. (credit: NASA/MSFC)

It's rare that a book about as high-minded and serious a topic as rocket science manages to be both highly informative and laugh-out-loud funny. But if there's a better way to describe John Clark's Ignition!, I've yet to discover it. A cult classic among chemists, many of the rest of us discovered the book via one of Derek Lowe's tales of hilariously scary chemicals.

It's where I learned words like hypergolic, which describes how eager one chemical is to spontaneously ignite, and realized that some of these mid-century scientists must have had as much right stuff as any test pilot. But there was a hitch-Ignition! was out of print, so reading it involved an interlibrary loan (or a dodgy PDF, which of course I can't condone).

But now, Rutgers University Press has decided to dust it off and reissue it. From May it will finally be possible to put a physical copy on one's bookshelf. And honestly, if you've got any interest in chemistry-particularly the branch of it involving violent, energetic, and occasionally explosive reactions-it's a book you need to read.

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