Another History of the Earth book is due out tomorrow.

Dr. Robert M. Hazen, a research scientist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington’s Geophysical Laboratory and Clarence Robinson Professor of Earth Science at George Mason University, is the author of more than 300 articles and books on science, history, and music.

In his new book, The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet, he tells the story of how Earth evolved from first atom to molecule, mineral to magma, granite crust to single cell to verdant living landscape.

The publishers call it a “radical new approach to Earth’s biography”. It explains how what Hazen calls “co-evolution” of the geosphere and biosphere—of rocks and living matter—has shaped our planet.

An interesting feature of the book is the description of pioneering men and women behind the sciences. Readers will meet black-market meteorite hawkers of the Sahara Desert, the gun-toting Feds who guarded the Apollo missions’ lunar dust, and the World War II Navy officer whose super-pressurized “bomb”—recycled from military hardware—first simulated the molten rock of Earth’s mantle. As a mentor to a new generation of scientists, Hazen introduces the intrepid young explorers whose dispatches from Earth’s harshest landscapes will revolutionize geology.