I haven't seen a physical copy yet, but apparently my latest book in German is out today (at least that's what amazon thinks). Ask at your bookshop or get it from amazon if you must. It is the second collection of the sketches I write for the Nachrichten aus der Chemie, the magazine of the German Chemical Society, covering roughly the last decade. The first collection was the nine million bicycles book published in Feb 2011.
The caterpillar in question is the tobacco hornworm / tobacco hawk moth (Manduca sexta), which has a remarkable resistance to nicotine as well as some other chemical tricks up its sleeve which I discussed in one of the sketches included here. I have a strong suspicion that Lewis Carroll had this species in mind when he invented the hookah-smoking caterpillar that confuses Alice with unhelpful answers in Alice's adventures in Wonderland, so I suggested to use an Alice illustration for the cover and got away with it. While it may be a little bit naughty to use another author's popularity this way, I feel that after 26 years at Oxford I can claim Lewis Carroll as my cultural background.
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