Life’s Essential Elements will be released soon. Although it has involved a lot of work, research and some mud-wrestling with Word and other software, it is an endeavour that I don’t want to conclude! I keep getting ideas to improve the book, but I could see how the necessary obsession is starting to get on the nerves of family members. For that reason, and because an individual life is not infinite, I will make an effort to wrap it up. What’s funny is that our dog Blues has gotten so used to me waking up early to work on it, that if I try staying in bed past 4 AM, he barks, urging me to come downstairs. Then he sits quietly and patiently until about 5 AM when he gets fed and taken out, not necessarily in that order.
The book is aimed at not only teachers and other aficionados of chemistry but at anyone who took the course in high school and wants to give the subject a second chance. Less than 20% of the book is rehash of past blogs. The rest is my crazy blend of teaching anecdotes and scholarly work but always centered around the theme of life-essential elements and compounds; how those substances are often also vital to industry and where they came from cosmically. The book delves into everything ranging from the biochemistry that makes music audible to the most efficient and least polluting way of making magnesium, the lightweight metal that’s needed to make alloys for suitcases, airplanes and bicycles.
It will be soon available on Amazon for only $4.99 with all my profits going to charity, specifically Montreal’s Center for Dream and Hopes for children with severe autism, Down’s Syndrome or other special needs. Originally I was going to make the book free, but I believe $4.99 is cheaper than a Big Mac and hopefully the book will be better brain- food for you. 🙂
In the same way that family has given me more satisfaction than serial relationships, and that a teaching career felt better than odd jobs, no matter how diversified, book-writing hits a deeper chord than blogs, essays and magazine articles. I am new at it, and I have no illusions of getting published, but what matters is the feeling of being committed to a bigger writing project, one that’s devoted to a field that gives us so much insight into our senses, nature and industry, all of which help our species survive. That field is one of three central sciences: chemistry.