Published in 2019
320 pages
Ruth Kassinger is the award-winning author of eight science and history books for young adults. In addition, her science and health writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, National Geographic Explorer, Health magazine, Science Weekly, and other publications. Ruth’s most recent book—her first for an adult audience—is Paradise Under Glass: An Amateur Creates A Conservatory Garden. She chronicles her journey through a midlife crisis by creating a conservatory at her suburban home. Her adventures of her transformation from brown thumb to green, she weaves the history of conservatories from Renaissance orangeries to glass palaces like Kew to today’s high-tech plant nurseries in Florida.
Ruth lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland, with her husband, a West Highland terrier, and dozens of tropical plants and trees.
What is this book about?
“No organisms are more important to life as we know it than algae. In Slime, Ruth Kassinger gives this under-appreciated group its due.” —Elizabeth Kolbert
Say “algae” and most people think of pond scum. What they don’t know is that without algae, none of us would exist.
There are as many algae on Earth as stars in the universe, and they have been essential to life on our planet for eons. Algae created the Earth we know today, with its oxygen-rich atmosphere, abundant oceans, and coral reefs. Crude oil is made of dead algae, and algae are the ancestors of all plants. Today, seaweed production is a multi-billion dollar industry, with algae hard at work to make your sushi, chocolate milk, beer, paint, toothpaste, shampoo and so much more.
In Slime we’ll meet the algae innovators working toward a sustainable future: from seaweed farmers in South Korea, to scientists using it to clean the dead zones in our waterways, to the entrepreneurs fighting to bring algae fuel and plastics to market.
With a multitude of lively, surprising science and history, Ruth Kassinger takes readers on an around-the-world, behind-the-scenes, and into-the-kitchen tour. Whether you thought algae was just the gunk in your fish tank or you eat seaweed with your oatmeal, Slime will delight and amaze with its stories of the good, the bad, and the up-and-coming.
