by Curt Stager
Thomas Dunne Books / St. Martin’s Press, October 2014
“We are made of star-stuff,” wrote Carl Sagan, famed astronomer and science communicator, in his 1973 book The Cosmic Connection. Paleoecologist Curt Stager expands on the poetic concept in his latest book, Your Atomic Self, in which he tracks the cyclical journey of the basic building blocks of matter through the cosmos, into the Earth, and into our bodies.
Stager sprinkles numerous philosophical gems throughout the book as he follows the elemental constituents of the human body on their trek through time and space: “The birth of your blood iron destroyed the stars that created it. Between their visits to Leonardo and to you, some of the same nonjudgmental atoms of the air also toured the lungs of Adolf Hitler,” and “When you flush your wastes, you scatter the atomic echoes of lightning bolts and volcanoes into a ...
