The Devil's Element
Phosphorus and a World Out of Balance
A New Yorker Best Book of 2023 • A Smithsonian Staff Favorite of 2023 Phosphorus has played a critical role in some of the most lethal substances on earth: firebombs, rat poison, nerve gas. But it’s also the key component of one of the most vital: fertilizer, which has sustained life for billions of people. In this major work of explanatory science and environmental journalism, Pulitzer Prize finalist Dan Egan investigates the past, present, and future of what has been called “the oil of our time.” The story of phosphorus spans the globe and vast tracts of human history. First discovered in a seventeenth-century alchemy…
The New York Times best-selling author on the source of great bounty—and now great peril—all over the world.
$24.99
June 4, 2024Dan Egan is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Death and Life of the Great Lakes. A two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, he lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with his wife and children.
The Devil's Element
Dan Egan