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

Traces the breakthrough discovery of oxygen at the end of the 1700s by a pair of rival scientists, describing how English dissenter Joseph Priestley and French aristocrat Antoine Lavoisier waged a fierce competition to solve the "riddle of air" in spite of such historical challenges as the American Revolution and the storming of the Bastille.