Book to Note

Eric Roston. The Carbon Age: How Life’s Core Element Has Become Civilization’s Greatest Threat. New York: Walker and Company, 2008. 304 pp. $29.95 cloth.

Reviewed by Neil Gussman

The title of Eric Roston’s book might lead the reader to expect yet another breathless apocalyptic pastiche of all the reasons the planet is doomed. But instead this is a work from an award-winning journalist who has become quite enamored of organic chemistry. The book covers the first 12 billion years of carbon’s existence, from initial formation after the Big Bang through the middle of the 19th century, and beyond. For most of Earth’s existence, the planet’s changes in temperature affected the atmosphere’s carbon content; when the temperature increased, so did carbon. But for the last 150 years, the reverse has been the case: Earth’s temperature has reacted to rising atmospheric carbon levels, and since 1850 human activity has sped up the rate of change by a factor of 100. Throughout the book Roston delights in the details, investigating the nature of molecular bonds and explaining the reason that higher hydrogen content in fuels means better efficiency. Roston ends on a hopeful note, talking with the irrepressible Richard Smalley about carbon nanotubes and buckyballs.