Book of the week
Caesar’s Last Breath by Sam Kean Doubleday 384pp £20 The Week Bookshop £17
A history of air is a “problematic” prospect, said James Mcconnachie in The Sunday Times. What narrative framework can contain such a “vast and misty topic”? In Caesar’s Last Breath, the US author Sam Kean largely “succeeds”, thanks to his “funny, clever and altogether effervescent” writing, and his knack for finding “human-interest stories that open up the science”. He begins with the “schoolroom” factoid that every breath we inhale contains a few particles exhaled by the dying Julius Caesar – which, remarkably, “turns out to be true”. From there, he takes in the story of the Earth’s formation (“from gases, ultimately”), and the 18th century discovery that our exhalations contain carbon dioxide (thanks to a “sardonic” experiment in which a beaker of slaked lime was placed in the rafters of a church: as the preacher “talked and talked”, it precipitated a milky fluid, indicating the presence of CO2). Kean also charts the future, covering climate change and nuclear fallout. Overall, air is perhaps “too diffuse a subject” to be captured between covers – but this hardly matters, since the stories are “excellent”.
Some of Kean’s best anecdotes are “genuinely eerie”, said James Marriott in The Times. One night in 1986, 1,746 people living near Lake Nyos, in Cameroon, were killed in their beds after a giant cloud of carbon dioxide rose up from the lake, “suffocating everything in its path”, including all the area’s insects. The causes, even today, are “somewhat mysterious”. Thankfully, Kean also revels in more light-hearted material – such as the story of the 19th century French “flatulist” Joseph Pujol, whose ability to trumpet La Marseillaise out of his bottom made him a “star attraction at the Moulin Rouge”. Other delightful titbits include the fact that Einstein once designed a fridge, and that 300 million years ago, the air was so full of oxygen that there were “dragonflies the size of seagulls”.
Some readers may find Kean’s “ultra-casual language” offputting, said Clive Cookson in the Financial Times. As he has it, toes are “tootsies”, underpants are “tighty-whities”, and Pujol may have owed his prodigious farting abilities to “scarfing broccoli or chugging raw milk”. Still, “there is no denying the pleasure and indeed the wealth of scientific information” to be gained from reading Caesar’s Last Breath. “It will change forever the way I think about breathing when I practise yoga, imagining all the other lungs that those nitrogen and oxygen molecules have visited before they enter mine.”