NAPOLEON'S BUTTONS: How 17 Molecules Changed History, by Penny Le Couteur and Jay Burreson, Tarcher/Putnam, 2003, 376 pages, $24.95 (ISBN 1-58542-220-7)

First, the book is barely about Napoleon's buttons. The title story only takes up about two pages of the introduction, along with an admission that the theory of disintegrating tin buttons being the downfall of Napoleon's army is apocryphal. Napoleon's buttons are really only used as a metaphor for the power of a chemical compound to affect the fate of civilizations.

And only 17 molecules? Chapters titled "Wonder Drugs" and "Dyes" give an idea of some of the broad categorizations of compounds discussed in the book. Even in a chapter called "The Pill," the authors pack in the historical significance, chemical characteristics, and structures of 10 or 11 additional drugs, hormones, and plant products. In the end, the book places more than 100 molecules into their appropriate historical contexts.

Yet given that the book offers both less and more than the title advertises, it's a mighty good read. The chemistry is carefully explained and isn't watered down. The combination of information that Penny Le Couteur, who teaches chemistry at Capilano College in British Columbia, and Jay Burreson, an industrial chemist in Corvallis, Ore., have gathered between two covers is not easy to find elsewhere.

Take the chapter on oleic acid, which pulls from chemistry, botany, history, rumor, food science, and medicine to tell the story of olive oil. Legends claim the first olive tree grew on top of Adam's grave. It subsequently became so important to the growth of civilizations in the Mediterranean that Le Couteur and Burreson feel confident writing that without oleic acid, "the development of Western civilization and democracy might have followed a very different path."

The chemistry of oleic acid isn't all that different from other oils extracted from plants. But it comes from a hardy tree well suited to the Mediterranean terrain and climate. And olive oil keeps longer than most other oils: Its proportion of polyunsaturated fatty acids, those that go bad first, is especially low.

Olive oil was thus excellent to export and economically bolstered the growth and spread of Hellenic culture. The wealth it spawned for Greek citizens gave them time to devote to art, science, and politics. The chapter also delves into the benefits of the cold-press method of extracting olive oil, the difference between HDLs and LDLs, soap-making, and the shape of the vial that held the oil that anointed the first 35 French monarchs.

Some of the most delightful parts of the book are its fascinating "could-be" stories. The dinosaurs' inability to detect the bitter taste of alkaloid poisons in new flowering plants may have helped lead to their extinction. Symptoms of the young girls who claimed to be bewitched in Salem, Mass., in 1692 could be attributed to ergot poisoning--ergot alkaloids are made by a fungus that infects damp cereal grains. Wealthy ancient Roman leaders, who sweetened their wine with lead acetate, stored their wine in lead vessels, and received their water from lead pipes, may have displayed the symptoms of lead poisoning--first irritation, then "gross mental instability."

The decline of the Roman Empire, the discovery of America, and the riots of the French Revolution are just a few of a host of historical events that were profoundly touched by one molecule or another. That is, according to a book that might better be named "Molecules and Man: How 17 Loose Groups of Chemical Compounds Changed History."

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