Ok, I haven't seen many scientific book recommendations around, so here's one;
Oxygen, the Molecule that made the World, by Nick Lane. (not on Kindle, though, just checked) From the book's introduction;
"This book is about life, death, and oxygen; about how and why life produced and adapted to oxygen; about the evolutionary past and future of life on Earth; about energy and health, disease and death, sex and regeneration; and about ourselves. Oxygen is important in ways that most of us hardly even begin to imagine, ways that are far more fascinating than the loud claims of health features."
He starts at the beginning; 4 billion years ago, when there was no oxygen at all in earths atmosphere, and oxygen was actually a poison to the first single-cell organisms. He goes through all the periods of the earth, the 'snowball earth' phases when even the tropics were covered in glaciers, all the explosions of life and all the extinctions, linking the rise and fall of oxygen to all of these events. He ends up exploring what causes us to age and whether all the fuss about fighting 'free radicals' is something we can actually do anything about or if it's just a marketing campaign.
It's a great book, that ties a whole lot of disciplines and time-lines together, and relates it all to real-time, real-life issues that we deal with in modern society. And it's written for the lay-person; it's not a hard read.