White light : the elemental role of phosphorus--in our cells, in our food, and in our world

"There would be no life without constant death." So begins Jack Lohmann's remarkable debut, White Light, a mesmerizing swirl of ecology, geology, chemistry, history, agricultural science, investigative reporting, and the poetry of the natural world. Wherever life has roamed, its record is left in the sediment; over centuries, that dead matter is compacted into rock; and in that rock is phosphate-one phosphorus atom bonded to four oxygen atoms-lif...