Your Atomic Self: The Invisible Elements That Connect You to Everything Else in the Universe

What do atoms have to do with your life? In this book, Curt Stager reveals how they connect you to some of the most amazing things in the universe.

You will follow your oxygen atoms through fire and water and from forests to your fingernails. Hydrogen atoms will wriggle into your hair and betray where you live and what you have been drinking. The carbon in your breath will become tree trunks, and the sodium in your tears will link you to long-dead oceans. The nitrogen in your muscles will help to turn the sky blue, the phosphorus in your bones will help to turn the coastal waters of North Carolina green, the calcium in your teeth will crush your food between atoms that were mined by mushrooms, and the iron in your blood will kill microbes as it once killed a star.

You will also discover that much of what death must inevitably do to your body is already happening among many of your atoms at this very moment and that, nonetheless, you and everyone else you know will always exist somewhere in the fabric of the universe.

You are not only made of atoms; you are atoms, and this book, in essence, is an atomic field guide to yourself.

CURT STAGER is an ecologist, paleoclimatologist, and science writer with a Ph.D. in biology and geology from Duke University. He has published more than numerous climate- and ecology-related articles in major journals, including Science and Quaternary Research, has written for popular audiences in periodicals such as National Geographic and Fast Company as well as in his book Deep Future, and co-hosts a weekly science program on North Country Public Radio. Curt teaches at Paul Smith’s College in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York and holds a research associate post at the University of Maine’s Climate Change Institute, where he investigates the long-term history of climate in Africa, South America, and the polar regions.