Book Review: Graphene

Graphene: The Superstrong, Superthin, and Superversatile Material That Will Revolutionize the World
Les Johnson, Joseph E. Meany
Science, engineering

Graphene is crazy stuff. It's incredibly simple--a repeating plane of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal latice. It's one atom thick. It's phenomenally strong: if plastic cling-wrap were made of graphene, you could support a car on it. It's a near-supercoductor. It's basically weightless. Plus I'm a sucker for the single-word-title biography-of-a-substance book. What could possibly go wrong?

Answer: the writing. Johnson and Meany have good intentions, but their writing skills show more enthusiasm than discipline. Graphene is written in a golly-gee-Mister-Wizard tone that set my teeth on edge from the first chapter. It also contains random anecdotes stuck in unhelpful places, repeated bits, a digressive and disorganized structure, and not nearly enough critical thinking. There's only a limited amount of graphene hagiography that I can stomach before I start feeling contrarian, and Graphene exceeds it early on. The worst part is a section imagining our glowing graphene-enhanced future which reads like somebody watched "Zinc Oxide and You" without realizing that it was funny.

The authors do manage to slip in many fascinating facts. There are also some remarkable graphs showing, for example, the growth in graphene-related patents. None of this, however, adds up to anything more than wishful thinking. Our Friend Graphene is the scientific miracle of the next decade? So is fusion, and it has been for fifty years. So were high-temperature superconductors. So were fuel-cell cars, a bit more than a decade ago. Who knows? Graphene is too long on passion and too short on analysis to let me make any kind of reasoned judgment on its eponymous material. And that's a missed opportunity.