What’s Gotten into You: The Story of Your Body’s Atoms, from the Big Bang Through Last Night’s Dinner

Documentarian Levitt sheds light on the tiniest bits of what humans are made of in his stellar debut. “Carl Sagan once famously said we are made of star stuff,” Levitt writes in his introduction. “This is the improbable story of how it happened.” Levitt covers the big bang, which led to the creation of “every particle in your body”; describes how elements are made within stars; outlines how the water that runs “through our veins” made its way to Earth (“humongous snowy dirt balls” are one theory, asteroids another); explains the nature of DNA; and extrapolates on how the food one eats “create[s] a living person.” Along the way, Levitt offers snapshot biographies of scientists: astronomer Cecilia Payne, for example, “transformed our view of how stars work,” and photosynthesis was discovered in 1779 by “a well-coiffed forty-nine-year-old Dutch physician and natural philosopher named Jan Ingenhousz.” The author claims that “to retrace the journeys of our atoms is to appreciate the world anew,” and his winning mix of astronomy, physics, biology, and chemistry will help readers do just that. This is marvelous. Agent: Suzanne Gluck, WME. (Jan.)