I loved the way he used the idea of "energy" as a focus for the book.

For instance, I've never thought of living things as similar to hurricanes (both are reasonably stable structures that maximize the movement of energy from an ordered to a disordered state.)

And I've never looked at the pyramid at Giza in terms of the terrajoules of gravitational potential energy in the blocks , or how the energy to move them was limited by what photosynthesis could produce...