The Elements We Live By: How Iron Helps Us Breathe, Potassium Lets Us See, and Other Surprising Superpowers of the Periodic Table

This "excellent" popular science book explores just what we-and the things around us-are made of (Aftenposten, Norway).

Some elements get all the attention: glittering gold, radioactive uranium-materials we call "precious" because they are so rare. But what could be more precious than the building blocks of life-from the oxygen in our air to the carbon in all living things?

In The Elements We Live By, physicist and award-winning author Anja Røyne reminds us that we'd be lost without the qu...