Air-Borne
The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
One of Smithsonian Magazine's Ten Best Science Books of 2025
The fascinating, untold story of the air we breathe, the hidden life it contains, and invisible dangers that can turn the world upside down
Every day we draw in two thousand gallons of air—and thousands of living things. From the ground to the stratosphere, the air teems with invisible life. This last great biological frontier remains so mysterious that it took over two years for scientists to finally agree that the Covid pandemic was caused by an airborne virus.
In Air-Borne, award-winning New York Times columnist and author Carl Zimmer leads us on an odyssey through the living atmosphere and through the history of its discovery. We travel to the tops of mountain glaciers, where Louis Pasteur caught germs from the air, and follow Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh above the clouds, where they conducted groundbreaking experiments. We meet the long-forgotten pioneers of aerobiology including William and Mildred Wells, who tried for decades to warn the world about airborne infections, only to die in obscurity.
Air-Borne chronicles the dark side of aerobiology with gripping accounts of how the United States and the Soviet Union clandestinely built arsenals of airborne biological weapons designed to spread anthrax, smallpox, and an array of other pathogens. Air-Borne also leaves readers looking at the world with new eyes—as a place where the oceans and forests loft trillions of cells into the air, where microbes eat clouds, and where life soars thousands of miles on the wind.
Weaving together gripping history with the latest reporting on Covid and other threats to global health, Air-Borne surprises us on every page as it reveals the hidden world of the air.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Exactly what floats unseen around us is the subject of intense scientific debates smartly summarized in this history of aerobiology. Starting in the ancient world and continuing to the present, science journalist Carl Zimmer lays out the struggle to understand what’s in the air. From arguments on germs involving icons like Louis Pasteur to the darker threat of biological weapons, the science is rife with wrong assumptions, petty rivalries, and diametrically opposed viewpoints. Zimmer points out that the main impediment to cracking the code on airborne pathogens is human nature. That doesn’t mean we should stop trying, though. He recounts how research done on tuberculosis in the mid-20th century proved invaluable to researchers racing to understand the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the material, Zimmer offers a light touch that keeps jargon from bogging down the narrative. Air-Borne imparts a new respect for the invisible life we encounter with every breath we take.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
New York Times science columnist Zimmer (Life's Edge) delivers an invigorating chronicle of how humanity's understanding of airborne microbes has evolved from the 19th century through the Covid pandemic. He notes that early scientific efforts to understand airborne life included French chemist Louis Pasteur's ascent of an Alpine glacier to test whether germs were "everywhere in the air at all times" or varied in density depending on location. Detailing the clever experiments that confirmed germs could spread via airborne particles, Zimmer describes how in 1934, Harvard University scientist William Wells sampled air from a lecture hall as he used a fan to spread sneezing powder through the room. Samples collected after class showed the most bacterial growth, indicating that germs from sneezing students collected not just on surfaces where saliva droplets had fallen but also in the air. The closing chapters bring Zimmer's larger ambitions into focus as he blends the stimulating history with first-rate reporting on the Covid pandemic, explaining that the medical community's continued skepticism of Wells's ideas meant medical professionals accepted only belatedly that Covid spread through airborne particles instead of droplets on surfaces, resulting in mixed messages about the effectiveness of masks that had deadly consequences. This astute history of the scientific debates that shaped the Covid crisis will take readers' breath away.
