BREAKDOWN

Breakdown is a light-hearted survey of entropy in action, written in the vein of Mary Roach, Sarah Vowell, and Bill Bryson.

This is a book for readers in the midst of a universe steadily, predictably falling apart at the seams and at every scale. It's for anyone willing to embrace the strange beauty of the second law of thermodynamics as it works its magic on everything from alligator corpses to galactic plasmas. The story of disintegration isn't just decay and decomposition. It's also an enduring theme in the history of human ingenuity. As Ornes puts it: "Acts of creation - whether of living things or living things building nonliving things - aren't really aimed at permanence. They are small, defiant stances against the inevitability of falling apart." And, indeed, the story of our world collapsing is only possible through careful observation of the living, and the existing. What, after all, calls forth our brilliance more than the steady onset of darkness? It's the careful study of apoptosis (the sort-of spontaneous death of cells), for example, that opens up new avenues of research into treating cancer. It's the death of a feral hog that seeds the forest-floor anew with its "pulse event" of fresh nitrogen. It's in the liminal transition between life and death that our whole world refreshes itself for another round of, well, breakdown. This is an exuberant, meaningful story of destruction, full of strange stories of abundance and carnage living side-by-side. Stephen Ornes is a Writer-in-Residence at Vanderbilt University, an award-winning journalist, and a graduate of the MIT Graduate Program in Science Writing. His work has appeared multiple times in Best American Science and Nature Writing, and he has contributed writing to Scientific American, Discover, New Scientist, One Story, and McSweeney's. He lives in Nashville with his family.