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Air: The Restless Shaper of the World
Air sustains the living. Every creature breathes to live, exchanging and changing the atmosphere. Water and dust spin and rise, make clouds and fall again, fertilizing the dirt. Twenty thousand fungal spores and half a million bacteria travel in a square foot of summer air. The chemical sense of aphids, the ultraviolet sight of swifts, a newborn's awareness of its mother's breast;all take place in the medium of air.
Ignorance of the air is costly. The artist Eva Hesse died of inhaling her fiberglass medium. Thousands were sickened after 9/11 by supposedly "safe" air. The African Sahel suffers drought in part because we fill the air with industrial dusts. With the passionate narrative style and wide-ranging erudition that have made William Bryant Logan's work a touchstone for nature lovers and environmentalists, Air is "like the contents of a bag of seaborne dust that Darwin collected aboard the Beagle";a treasure trove of discovery.
Ignorance of the air is costly. The artist Eva Hesse died of inhaling her fiberglass medium. Thousands were sickened after 9/11 by supposedly "safe" air. The African Sahel suffers drought in part because we fill the air with industrial dusts. With the passionate narrative style and wide-ranging erudition that have made William Bryant Logan's work a touchstone for nature lovers and environmentalists, Air is "like the contents of a bag of seaborne dust that Darwin collected aboard the Beagle";a treasure trove of discovery.
400 pages, Hardcover
First published August 20, 2012
30 people are currently reading
424 people want to read
About the author
William Bryant Logan
18 books57 followersWilliam Bryant Logan is a certified arborist and president of Urban Arborists, Inc., a Brooklyn-based tree company. Logan has won numerous Quill and Trowel Awards from the Garden Writers of America and won a 2012 Senior Scholar Award from the New York State chapter of the International Society of Arborists. He also won an NEH grant to translate Calderon de la Barca. He is on faculty at NYBG and is the author of Oak and Dirt, the latter of which was made into an award-winning documentary. The same filmmakers are currently planning a documentary made from Air. He lives in New York City.
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Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews
January 9, 2014
This is a lovely, easy, dreamy read. It's far more a meditation on things having to do with air than a science book. The chapters form a hodge-podge that eventually becomes a picture, but it's part memoir, part poem, and part science.
This use of pictures is strange. There are a few pictures, but that are largely not helpful to the author to make his point. And then when he really needs a picture, there isn't one, and his language gets tangled trying to make up for it. The most obvious example is that his chapter on the perception and portrayal of the air in the history of art. He describes paintings but doesn't reprint any of them, and the chapter really withers without them. But there are multiple others points that could have used a picture if he really wanted to make his point clear.
But in the end, being perfectly clear may not have been his goal. Just getting us to reflect on the importance and busy-ness of air, the indelible essence that surrounds us every day, is probably the aim of a book like this. And in that, it is successful.
This use of pictures is strange. There are a few pictures, but that are largely not helpful to the author to make his point. And then when he really needs a picture, there isn't one, and his language gets tangled trying to make up for it. The most obvious example is that his chapter on the perception and portrayal of the air in the history of art. He describes paintings but doesn't reprint any of them, and the chapter really withers without them. But there are multiple others points that could have used a picture if he really wanted to make his point clear.
But in the end, being perfectly clear may not have been his goal. Just getting us to reflect on the importance and busy-ness of air, the indelible essence that surrounds us every day, is probably the aim of a book like this. And in that, it is successful.
April 7, 2018
A book that discusses everything about the air and atmosphere, including in space and below the ocean waves.
Divided into sections like spinning, flying and breathing.
Divided into sections like spinning, flying and breathing.
November 8, 2022
Breath turns place into a habitat. If you can breathe there, you can live there. The living have succeeded in occupying the entire air, from bottom to top- an area four times as great as all the water in the oceans.- and over the full range of possible climates. An isopod lives happily an inch beneath Sahara sands, while a Ruppell’s griffon, a vulture, flies at an altitude of thirty-six thousand feet. There are tide pool mollusks that breathe water when the wave rolls in and breathe air when the wave rolls out. A turtle can hold a breath for months.
Am I the only person in the world that reads a book like this and is breathless with wonder, and wishes I could write poetry based on the wonders he reveals? There were boring parts, such as the weather on D-day and how much new furniture can be polluting, but overall it is astonishingly packed with information, history, art, lore and poetic ways at looking at air. I liked his book Dirt, and think I love this one, and can’t wait to read Oak. Who in a million years could have predicted that a book about air would be about music also? And how many breaths are in the air around us? Pheromones and spiders flinging themselves into the air? I could guess forests and plants, pollen and things in the air, flying, weather, but still the richness of detail was magnificent. I didn’t catch many references to how indigenous peoples regarded air, and the book is dense, but that is one failing I noticed and hope could be corrected in the future.
How much breath is in the air around us? Let’s take a walk and count the breaths on a 2000 acre nature reserve in upstate New York. Honeybees, thought they do not breathe the way we do, have spiracles that take in air at a rate of ten milliliters, or a third of an ounce, per hour, and there are perhaps six hundred thousand bees here… White footed mice breathes about 135 times a minute, and shrews between 152-800 times a minute and there are 1,800 white footed mice and 2,000 shrews.
At least two Home sapiens breathing an average of 19 times a minute, and let’s assume another two-dozen humans hiking or working the preserve…A song sparrow breathes about 63 times each minute, and in spring, there may be about sixty more song sparrows on 2,000 acres…High overhead a pair of turkey vultures patrol, finding thermals, and in a minute each breathes 9 times, and about 18 vultures on the preserve. There may be about 20 coyotes on the land, and they breathe 13 times per minute…A ruby throated hummingbird is sampling the flowers, takin in air at the rate of 250 breaths per minute, and maybe a dozen of them in the preserve. Seventy-five blue jays breathing at 49 times per minute… a big brown bat can breathe as little as 4 times per minute in winter torpor, but in rapid flight she breathes 600 times per minute or even more. There may be three brown bats on the reserve…
If we take every creature as representative of its species, we get around 19 million breaths per minute, 1.1 billion breaths per hour, 27 billion breaths per day. Of course, some of our breathers do not take much air in a single gulp. One breath of a shrew, for example, is about the size of a couscous grain. What then is the total volume of air that is breathed in this place in a day? The amount breathed by the visible creatures is astonishing. On the preserve alone, the mammals breathe 650,000 gallons of air per day; the birds, about 30,000 gallons, and the reptiles and amphibians, about 450 gallons. But this is nothing compared to the breath of the invisible. Insects, spiders, and worms breathe about one million gallons per day.
The champions are the microbes and the plants. Together they breathe better than 8 1/2 million gallons of air a day. In all the living on the preserve breathe more than ten million gallons in a single day. If you ran a hose nonstop, it would take about ten thousand years for that volume of water to come out. It is then perhaps neither a poetic way of speaking nor an exaggeration to spay that the atmosphere is regulated by the living. From air and water, all the living are derived through the medium of breath. Perhaps it is fair to say that breath is being, and that creatures are expressions of that existence.
The air is the kingdom of breath. The average person takes about 30,000 breaths per day or about 11 million per year. The human population of the earth takes more than 8 trillion breaths per hour. If air were visible, we would see a constant torrent passing in and out of us.
Where does a lonely breath taken above tree line at 14,000 feet go? I think of John Muir studying glaciers, alone with his rucksack and his pound of coffee, and his exhalation includes a little tannin and glucose. His breath is a lot less full of the usual gases because at 14,000 feet the air is 30 percent less dense. At the top of the Sierra Nevada, there is a stiff west wind and it skips over the summit, picks up Muir’s breath and immediately plunges it into the vortex on the other side. The water rises from the mix and condenses at the edge of a lenticular cloud that hangs over the mountain’s lee, never moving. The gases and aerosols are entrained in the westerlies. Soon, a grove of ponderosa pine makes use of some. The algal partners of orange lichens take up some of the oxygen, while the fungal partner takes up the carbon. The tannins are carried back up over the lip of the summit, where they form condensation nuclei- the indispensable centers on which raindrops form- for the afternoon’s thunderstorms.
Breath as an action also has a result. It creates an atmosphere. In the largest sense, the troposphere- the part of the atmosphere where the air constantly changes and where the living live- is the produce of all our respiration and photosynthesis. All those daily breaths. The air is not a thing or a place. It is the continual product of communion.
Most of the plant pollen falls within twenty-five to fifty miles of its point of origin. Occasionally a storm does carry pollen far. One the evening of 24 June 1914m a Norwegian Arctic expedition ran into a pine pollen storm at sea, more than fifty miles from the nearest pine forest. The pollen fell at a rate of 150 grains per cubic inch, turning the decks yellow, as though they had been doused with a very fine corn flour. Even stranger, on the island of Tristan de Cunha, lost in the South Atlantic, cores taken in peat bogs revealed the pollen grains of Nothofagus trees and Ephedra plants which must have blown from their nearest habitats, twenty-five hundred miles to the west in South America.
Cistercian monks embodied in their architecture their conviction that the origin, source, and eternity of the living came into relationship with their surroundings. Every day, eight times a day, the monks of Senanque enacted this by singing it in this cathedral. Bernard of Clairvaux said, “through the beauty of the sensible (of the senses) the soul rises to true beauty.” Imagine what it would be like to be a choir of monks singing the psalms at Matins, Lauds, Vespers, Compline. I am sure that, like everything on this earth, some days the songs sounded very old and tired, but on others the music taught them as few other things on our planet might teach: that the harmony of one sense responds to the harmony of another. The cathedral proportions translate directly into the songs we hear. Sight and sound share this canon of beauty: an irresolvable and inexplicable order that gives back more than it takes.
Songs, prayers, incantations, poems- all open a channel that we hope will make the thing they sing about be so. There is something in the enactment of words with their rhythms that lends them power. The word, “enchanted,” in its origin, means “brought into being by song.”
A song requires two things: breath and a listener. Nothing can said without exhaling. You must release your breath to say, to chant, to shout, to sing. And for there to be a word, an invocation, a call, a song, there must be a listener, a creature with vibratory apparatus attuned to receiving and encoding what you have just spoken into space. These acts suppose or create a community and thus a world.
The air can play a harp. When a steady wind blows over taut strings- or even over telephone lines or a ship’s cable- it can vibrate the strings side to side. The steady wind, when it meets the blunt edge of the string, swirls around both sides. Behind the string, there arises what is wonderfully called “a vortex street.” It is a street that bends alternatively to one side and then the other behind it. This alternate motion will make a slender and movable obstacle vibrate as the vortex shifts from side to side. Hence, the Aeolian wind harp. Ralph Waldo Emerson was so delighted by the wind harp that he kept one in his study window, wrote, “it trembles to the cosmic breath/as it heareth, so it saith/ obeying meek the primal cause/ it is the tongue of mundane laws.” To the poets, the Aeolian harp was about the reception of a truth inaccessible to science. It was quite literally about inspiration, since it was the breath of the wind that made it play. It is perfectly receptive. To be open to what nature brings was what the Romantic poets most wanted. Coleridge write that perhaps all beings received their thoughts and feelings in this way and so sounded as the harp. Shelley thought that all beings were played upon by a constant stream of internal and external impressions, and it was the work of the poet to make harmony of the inner melody they receive.
The strongest winds naturally occurring on the surface on the earth- almost three hundred miles per hour- are found in the biggest tornadoes. They come from a vortex with runaway tightening where the inward- and outward-tending fore’s of the spin collapse toward the center point, dramatically accelerating the motion. There are only two regions in the world where tornadoes are common. One encompasses Bangladesh and northeastern India. The other is the American Midwest. Both regions lie each of a major mountain range, and north of a warm ocean. The combined influence of the two is what drives these intense and slender spins.
Forecasting is not about familiarity. If, as scientists proved, the exact same weather conditions have never recurred in the history of the planet, weather forecasting may seem a hopeless task. We are immersed in a world where the smaller unobserved change could make the difference between a sunny day and a massive storm.
The more interesting issue, to my mind, is not why the daytime sky is blue, but why it is light, since there are no days and nights in outer space. The sky is light because of the air. When the astronauts look out the window of their craft in orbit, they see the sun and they see the stars and the moon and the blue-green earth- all of these are very bright, but everything else is basic black. The thin film of gases surrounding the earth, the dusts, the spores, the vapor, the droplets, the height, the kind and thickness of clouds, the angle at which the sun is shining- all of these go to make a sky that has such a range of color in it. Sun and weather make the sky. Color belongs to this world.
Wherever there are plants in all the world, the sun powers the ascent of the sap and so sets in motion the processes by which all creatures live. Tress are the largest, the most massive, and the longest-lived creatures on earth. If you could count all plants, green growing things outnumber all other life on the planet by a factor of ten to one. There are ten pounds of plants for each pound of the rest of us.
Trees produced more oxygen than they use; in general they use 6 molecules of carbon dioxide to photosynthesize one molecule of glucose, and 6 oxygen molecules are released as a by-product. A mature sycamore might produce 100kg/220 lbs of oxygen per year. A human breathes in 9 tones of air in a year, and oxygen makes up 23 percent, so about 740 kg/1630 lbs of oxygen per year, about seven or eight tree’s yearly output. One large tree can provide a day’s supply for four people. Pines are at the bottom of the list of oxygen release because they have a low Leaf Area Index; oak and aspen are intermediate, and maple, beech, spruce and Douglas-fir are at the topof the list.
Trees are heavy, solid, stable, and persistent, and they never move until they fall. The air is quick, transparent, ephemeral, every moving, every changing, never still. But joined together by the sun, trees and air are the planet’s breasted symbionts. What does a tree give to the air? First of all, water. The tree transports liquid water from the ground, pumps it through a labyrinth of tiny pipes, and emits it as a gas- water vapor- through stomata, tiny holes on the back side of every leaf. The scale is hard to fathom, but consider than an oak leaf has about nine thousand stomata per square inch, and a good mature red oak has maybe ninety million leaves. That makes about 1.6 trillion tiny outlets through which the liquid water in the ground becomes the gas of water vapor in the air. And that is just one tree. In the air, the water vapor is the source of clouds and future rain and snow. When it condenses into clouds, it releases heat energy that propels the circulation of the atmosphere. The power, the pattern, and the range of storms are all in large measure the gifts of trees and plants to the air. The second gift is oxygen. Trees and plants produce all of the free oxygen in the air by means of photosynthesis. Oxygen makes ozone, which protects the living from ultraviolet rays and puts a lid on the sky.
What does the air give a tree? First of all, carbon dioxide. Trees pull the gas in through the same trillions of stomata beneath the leaves. Carbon dioxide is the foundation of all life’s fuel, all its structure, and all its behavior. The second gift is water, because it is the power of the air that draws the water through the tree and the water is the first step in photosynthesis…The air may pull as much as a hundred gallons of water through a single tree in a day. Each year it pulls twenty inches of rain from the ground through the trees of an oak-hickory forest in the southern Appalachians. Less than a tenth of the water that comes in through the roots is used inside the tree. The rest just passes through, trillions upon trillions of streams rising every day of the growing season into the air.
Am I the only person in the world that reads a book like this and is breathless with wonder, and wishes I could write poetry based on the wonders he reveals? There were boring parts, such as the weather on D-day and how much new furniture can be polluting, but overall it is astonishingly packed with information, history, art, lore and poetic ways at looking at air. I liked his book Dirt, and think I love this one, and can’t wait to read Oak. Who in a million years could have predicted that a book about air would be about music also? And how many breaths are in the air around us? Pheromones and spiders flinging themselves into the air? I could guess forests and plants, pollen and things in the air, flying, weather, but still the richness of detail was magnificent. I didn’t catch many references to how indigenous peoples regarded air, and the book is dense, but that is one failing I noticed and hope could be corrected in the future.
How much breath is in the air around us? Let’s take a walk and count the breaths on a 2000 acre nature reserve in upstate New York. Honeybees, thought they do not breathe the way we do, have spiracles that take in air at a rate of ten milliliters, or a third of an ounce, per hour, and there are perhaps six hundred thousand bees here… White footed mice breathes about 135 times a minute, and shrews between 152-800 times a minute and there are 1,800 white footed mice and 2,000 shrews.
At least two Home sapiens breathing an average of 19 times a minute, and let’s assume another two-dozen humans hiking or working the preserve…A song sparrow breathes about 63 times each minute, and in spring, there may be about sixty more song sparrows on 2,000 acres…High overhead a pair of turkey vultures patrol, finding thermals, and in a minute each breathes 9 times, and about 18 vultures on the preserve. There may be about 20 coyotes on the land, and they breathe 13 times per minute…A ruby throated hummingbird is sampling the flowers, takin in air at the rate of 250 breaths per minute, and maybe a dozen of them in the preserve. Seventy-five blue jays breathing at 49 times per minute… a big brown bat can breathe as little as 4 times per minute in winter torpor, but in rapid flight she breathes 600 times per minute or even more. There may be three brown bats on the reserve…
If we take every creature as representative of its species, we get around 19 million breaths per minute, 1.1 billion breaths per hour, 27 billion breaths per day. Of course, some of our breathers do not take much air in a single gulp. One breath of a shrew, for example, is about the size of a couscous grain. What then is the total volume of air that is breathed in this place in a day? The amount breathed by the visible creatures is astonishing. On the preserve alone, the mammals breathe 650,000 gallons of air per day; the birds, about 30,000 gallons, and the reptiles and amphibians, about 450 gallons. But this is nothing compared to the breath of the invisible. Insects, spiders, and worms breathe about one million gallons per day.
The champions are the microbes and the plants. Together they breathe better than 8 1/2 million gallons of air a day. In all the living on the preserve breathe more than ten million gallons in a single day. If you ran a hose nonstop, it would take about ten thousand years for that volume of water to come out. It is then perhaps neither a poetic way of speaking nor an exaggeration to spay that the atmosphere is regulated by the living. From air and water, all the living are derived through the medium of breath. Perhaps it is fair to say that breath is being, and that creatures are expressions of that existence.
The air is the kingdom of breath. The average person takes about 30,000 breaths per day or about 11 million per year. The human population of the earth takes more than 8 trillion breaths per hour. If air were visible, we would see a constant torrent passing in and out of us.
Where does a lonely breath taken above tree line at 14,000 feet go? I think of John Muir studying glaciers, alone with his rucksack and his pound of coffee, and his exhalation includes a little tannin and glucose. His breath is a lot less full of the usual gases because at 14,000 feet the air is 30 percent less dense. At the top of the Sierra Nevada, there is a stiff west wind and it skips over the summit, picks up Muir’s breath and immediately plunges it into the vortex on the other side. The water rises from the mix and condenses at the edge of a lenticular cloud that hangs over the mountain’s lee, never moving. The gases and aerosols are entrained in the westerlies. Soon, a grove of ponderosa pine makes use of some. The algal partners of orange lichens take up some of the oxygen, while the fungal partner takes up the carbon. The tannins are carried back up over the lip of the summit, where they form condensation nuclei- the indispensable centers on which raindrops form- for the afternoon’s thunderstorms.
Breath as an action also has a result. It creates an atmosphere. In the largest sense, the troposphere- the part of the atmosphere where the air constantly changes and where the living live- is the produce of all our respiration and photosynthesis. All those daily breaths. The air is not a thing or a place. It is the continual product of communion.
Most of the plant pollen falls within twenty-five to fifty miles of its point of origin. Occasionally a storm does carry pollen far. One the evening of 24 June 1914m a Norwegian Arctic expedition ran into a pine pollen storm at sea, more than fifty miles from the nearest pine forest. The pollen fell at a rate of 150 grains per cubic inch, turning the decks yellow, as though they had been doused with a very fine corn flour. Even stranger, on the island of Tristan de Cunha, lost in the South Atlantic, cores taken in peat bogs revealed the pollen grains of Nothofagus trees and Ephedra plants which must have blown from their nearest habitats, twenty-five hundred miles to the west in South America.
Cistercian monks embodied in their architecture their conviction that the origin, source, and eternity of the living came into relationship with their surroundings. Every day, eight times a day, the monks of Senanque enacted this by singing it in this cathedral. Bernard of Clairvaux said, “through the beauty of the sensible (of the senses) the soul rises to true beauty.” Imagine what it would be like to be a choir of monks singing the psalms at Matins, Lauds, Vespers, Compline. I am sure that, like everything on this earth, some days the songs sounded very old and tired, but on others the music taught them as few other things on our planet might teach: that the harmony of one sense responds to the harmony of another. The cathedral proportions translate directly into the songs we hear. Sight and sound share this canon of beauty: an irresolvable and inexplicable order that gives back more than it takes.
Songs, prayers, incantations, poems- all open a channel that we hope will make the thing they sing about be so. There is something in the enactment of words with their rhythms that lends them power. The word, “enchanted,” in its origin, means “brought into being by song.”
A song requires two things: breath and a listener. Nothing can said without exhaling. You must release your breath to say, to chant, to shout, to sing. And for there to be a word, an invocation, a call, a song, there must be a listener, a creature with vibratory apparatus attuned to receiving and encoding what you have just spoken into space. These acts suppose or create a community and thus a world.
The air can play a harp. When a steady wind blows over taut strings- or even over telephone lines or a ship’s cable- it can vibrate the strings side to side. The steady wind, when it meets the blunt edge of the string, swirls around both sides. Behind the string, there arises what is wonderfully called “a vortex street.” It is a street that bends alternatively to one side and then the other behind it. This alternate motion will make a slender and movable obstacle vibrate as the vortex shifts from side to side. Hence, the Aeolian wind harp. Ralph Waldo Emerson was so delighted by the wind harp that he kept one in his study window, wrote, “it trembles to the cosmic breath/as it heareth, so it saith/ obeying meek the primal cause/ it is the tongue of mundane laws.” To the poets, the Aeolian harp was about the reception of a truth inaccessible to science. It was quite literally about inspiration, since it was the breath of the wind that made it play. It is perfectly receptive. To be open to what nature brings was what the Romantic poets most wanted. Coleridge write that perhaps all beings received their thoughts and feelings in this way and so sounded as the harp. Shelley thought that all beings were played upon by a constant stream of internal and external impressions, and it was the work of the poet to make harmony of the inner melody they receive.
The strongest winds naturally occurring on the surface on the earth- almost three hundred miles per hour- are found in the biggest tornadoes. They come from a vortex with runaway tightening where the inward- and outward-tending fore’s of the spin collapse toward the center point, dramatically accelerating the motion. There are only two regions in the world where tornadoes are common. One encompasses Bangladesh and northeastern India. The other is the American Midwest. Both regions lie each of a major mountain range, and north of a warm ocean. The combined influence of the two is what drives these intense and slender spins.
Forecasting is not about familiarity. If, as scientists proved, the exact same weather conditions have never recurred in the history of the planet, weather forecasting may seem a hopeless task. We are immersed in a world where the smaller unobserved change could make the difference between a sunny day and a massive storm.
The more interesting issue, to my mind, is not why the daytime sky is blue, but why it is light, since there are no days and nights in outer space. The sky is light because of the air. When the astronauts look out the window of their craft in orbit, they see the sun and they see the stars and the moon and the blue-green earth- all of these are very bright, but everything else is basic black. The thin film of gases surrounding the earth, the dusts, the spores, the vapor, the droplets, the height, the kind and thickness of clouds, the angle at which the sun is shining- all of these go to make a sky that has such a range of color in it. Sun and weather make the sky. Color belongs to this world.
Wherever there are plants in all the world, the sun powers the ascent of the sap and so sets in motion the processes by which all creatures live. Tress are the largest, the most massive, and the longest-lived creatures on earth. If you could count all plants, green growing things outnumber all other life on the planet by a factor of ten to one. There are ten pounds of plants for each pound of the rest of us.
Trees produced more oxygen than they use; in general they use 6 molecules of carbon dioxide to photosynthesize one molecule of glucose, and 6 oxygen molecules are released as a by-product. A mature sycamore might produce 100kg/220 lbs of oxygen per year. A human breathes in 9 tones of air in a year, and oxygen makes up 23 percent, so about 740 kg/1630 lbs of oxygen per year, about seven or eight tree’s yearly output. One large tree can provide a day’s supply for four people. Pines are at the bottom of the list of oxygen release because they have a low Leaf Area Index; oak and aspen are intermediate, and maple, beech, spruce and Douglas-fir are at the topof the list.
Trees are heavy, solid, stable, and persistent, and they never move until they fall. The air is quick, transparent, ephemeral, every moving, every changing, never still. But joined together by the sun, trees and air are the planet’s breasted symbionts. What does a tree give to the air? First of all, water. The tree transports liquid water from the ground, pumps it through a labyrinth of tiny pipes, and emits it as a gas- water vapor- through stomata, tiny holes on the back side of every leaf. The scale is hard to fathom, but consider than an oak leaf has about nine thousand stomata per square inch, and a good mature red oak has maybe ninety million leaves. That makes about 1.6 trillion tiny outlets through which the liquid water in the ground becomes the gas of water vapor in the air. And that is just one tree. In the air, the water vapor is the source of clouds and future rain and snow. When it condenses into clouds, it releases heat energy that propels the circulation of the atmosphere. The power, the pattern, and the range of storms are all in large measure the gifts of trees and plants to the air. The second gift is oxygen. Trees and plants produce all of the free oxygen in the air by means of photosynthesis. Oxygen makes ozone, which protects the living from ultraviolet rays and puts a lid on the sky.
What does the air give a tree? First of all, carbon dioxide. Trees pull the gas in through the same trillions of stomata beneath the leaves. Carbon dioxide is the foundation of all life’s fuel, all its structure, and all its behavior. The second gift is water, because it is the power of the air that draws the water through the tree and the water is the first step in photosynthesis…The air may pull as much as a hundred gallons of water through a single tree in a day. Each year it pulls twenty inches of rain from the ground through the trees of an oak-hickory forest in the southern Appalachians. Less than a tenth of the water that comes in through the roots is used inside the tree. The rest just passes through, trillions upon trillions of streams rising every day of the growing season into the air.
September 24, 2012
This is a rather poetic book, something of a rarity in popular science and not necessarily one that fits well with the genre. The author, who has a botanical background, tries to give the reader a portrait of the air as it influences mostly living things on the planet.
I’m afraid that for me it just didn’t work. I found the attempt to be arty in descriptions simply plodding and hard work. I just wasn’t getting anywhere quickly enough: I found myself making excuses for why I wasn’t coming back to the book every time I put it down. I can see it will work for some people, but it didn’t for me.
Apart from anything else, the title is a bit misleading. The book is called ‘AIR – the restless shaper of the world’ – but very little of it is actually about the air, it’s much more about how living things on the Earth make use of the air. Even when you get a section labelled ‘Shining’ with chapters like ‘Why the daytime sky is light’ (which spends most of its time explaining why it’s not about why the sky is blue), there is very little content about the air and soon William Bryant Logan is off on one of his pet topics again.
I haven’t read the author’s previous books Dirt and Oak, but by the sound of them they are much more the kind of thing he ought to be writing. Air is not his kind of thing.
Review first published on www.popularscience.co.uk and reproduced with permission
I’m afraid that for me it just didn’t work. I found the attempt to be arty in descriptions simply plodding and hard work. I just wasn’t getting anywhere quickly enough: I found myself making excuses for why I wasn’t coming back to the book every time I put it down. I can see it will work for some people, but it didn’t for me.
Apart from anything else, the title is a bit misleading. The book is called ‘AIR – the restless shaper of the world’ – but very little of it is actually about the air, it’s much more about how living things on the Earth make use of the air. Even when you get a section labelled ‘Shining’ with chapters like ‘Why the daytime sky is light’ (which spends most of its time explaining why it’s not about why the sky is blue), there is very little content about the air and soon William Bryant Logan is off on one of his pet topics again.
I haven’t read the author’s previous books Dirt and Oak, but by the sound of them they are much more the kind of thing he ought to be writing. Air is not his kind of thing.
Review first published on www.popularscience.co.uk and reproduced with permission
June 3, 2023
I expected this to be something like 18 Miles: The Epic Drama of Our Atmosphere and Weather, but it’s much more of a delightful grab-bag. There are indeed sections on weather and climate — how air, unevenly heated and moisturized, is driven into circulation and creates terrifying and wondrous weather across the world — but Logan looks more broadly into how air serves the world, not only by giving animals and plants stuff to breath, but by constituting the platform through which creatures great and small live and move and have their being — giving fungi a way to get around, drawing animals together with pheromones, and filling the world with beauty in the form of birdsong. I love a science book that makes me feel like a kid again, drinking greedily at the inexhaustible fount of wonder that is the natural world, and Logan does that. Even more interestingly, though, he writes with a poet’s quill, using the discussion of natural phenomenon to drift into other discussions. The chapter on pheromones, for instance, turns into a muse on love and living within its mystery. Logan has two other books which I was already interested in (Dirt and Oak), but the varied pleasures of Air mean I’m definitely pursing more of his work.
July 17, 2018
Less of a continuous book than a monogram where each vignette builds off the previous.
Logan, who is on the faculty at the New York Botanical Garden, has also written "Oak" and "Dirt." Like them "Air" is a seemingly innocuous title. And indeed he starts with mycology of the air describing all the spores and fungi that float through the air (and thus our lungs), daily.
IN the section, Spinning, Logan describes weather and weather patterns - even retelling the story I read in James Gleik's of small changes in inputs into a computer atmosphere causing larger changers in predictions. Logan then carries this through to predicting the weather for D-Day and what the pilots would face.
Those pilots lead into the section Flying and Logan's own flight lessons and then those of other pilots and much more interestingly birds. Each of these sections are fascinating and told from a scientist who is still excited to learn about biology and geology and mycology.
Without getting too far into the details or into the weeds of a scientific tome, Air creates an easy read as we drift, soar, smell and see the world of atmosphere.
Logan, who is on the faculty at the New York Botanical Garden, has also written "Oak" and "Dirt." Like them "Air" is a seemingly innocuous title. And indeed he starts with mycology of the air describing all the spores and fungi that float through the air (and thus our lungs), daily.
IN the section, Spinning, Logan describes weather and weather patterns - even retelling the story I read in James Gleik's of small changes in inputs into a computer atmosphere causing larger changers in predictions. Logan then carries this through to predicting the weather for D-Day and what the pilots would face.
Those pilots lead into the section Flying and Logan's own flight lessons and then those of other pilots and much more interestingly birds. Each of these sections are fascinating and told from a scientist who is still excited to learn about biology and geology and mycology.
Without getting too far into the details or into the weeds of a scientific tome, Air creates an easy read as we drift, soar, smell and see the world of atmosphere.
February 3, 2019
This is a challenging read for someone (like me) who’s mind is not scientifically inclined. But William Bryant Logan draws the reader into a meditation on the various roles that the air plays in our lives, from the obvious (sustainer of life) to the sensory ( sound, smell and light all pass through the air) to the mechanical ( how do airplanes get off the ground, for example). I must admit that the first section, “Floating”, almost defeated me. We are in the world of spores, bacteria, and many other things floating in the air. Spores from the Sahara make it to the Amazon rainforest and fungi are everywhere. But this reader got lost in the Cladosporium, or was it the Leptosphaeria? But overall, the book is both erudite and full of humanity. Long the the air we breathe!
June 23, 2019
The book that answers questions you never thought to ask
As soon as I finished this book I went right back to the beginning and re read it. Could one author have all this information ?. Maybe he is like Caroline Keene
the writer of all those Nancy Drew books I read as a kid. I was a bit disappointed to discover that Ms Keene was a syndicate.
I suppose William Bryant Logan is a real person. But really, who knows the respiratory rate of a honey bee ? And the population of voles on a particular plot of ground ?
Anyway, I have purchased his book Dirt and when I get through that I plan to read Oak. So I must not be too doubtful of his singular existence. Guess he is what they call a polymath.
I recommend both book and author
As soon as I finished this book I went right back to the beginning and re read it. Could one author have all this information ?. Maybe he is like Caroline Keene
the writer of all those Nancy Drew books I read as a kid. I was a bit disappointed to discover that Ms Keene was a syndicate.
I suppose William Bryant Logan is a real person. But really, who knows the respiratory rate of a honey bee ? And the population of voles on a particular plot of ground ?
Anyway, I have purchased his book Dirt and when I get through that I plan to read Oak. So I must not be too doubtful of his singular existence. Guess he is what they call a polymath.
I recommend both book and author
March 4, 2021
Sometimes nonfiction writing can be bags of facts. And for me, some of the vignettes were more like that than others. It's interesting to learn about the facts...and to get the sense of them all as ways to look at and experience the air....yet some were meaningful to me and others I skimmed. I loved the lyrical parts - the very beginning and the very end in particular.
I found some of the author's inclusion of his life pompous--"My wife and I like to spend part of February in the west of Spain, in Extremadura. So does the common crane." In another moment, he writes of how the power of breathing made hiking 35 miles a day with a 50-pound pack possible. Those broke the flow for me.
I found some of the author's inclusion of his life pompous--"My wife and I like to spend part of February in the west of Spain, in Extremadura. So does the common crane." In another moment, he writes of how the power of breathing made hiking 35 miles a day with a 50-pound pack possible. Those broke the flow for me.
July 4, 2019
Strap in for an amazing ride through Air
I am amazed that any human being can be so articulate, engaging, enlightening and entertaining on so many scientific subjects that affect everyone who ever lived....or will live.
It took awhile to read this, but if I was so inclined, I could easily start over and learn more the second time around than the first.
We think we know something about the ubiquitous nature of the air around us until tapping into a comprehensive tome such as this. It will leave any reader...well, gasping for air!
I am amazed that any human being can be so articulate, engaging, enlightening and entertaining on so many scientific subjects that affect everyone who ever lived....or will live.
It took awhile to read this, but if I was so inclined, I could easily start over and learn more the second time around than the first.
We think we know something about the ubiquitous nature of the air around us until tapping into a comprehensive tome such as this. It will leave any reader...well, gasping for air!
January 28, 2024
I started this book wondering if it would be above my head, if a background in biological science would leave me lost when it came to atmospheric science. Luckily, this author is brilliant connecting observations across multiple fields that left me curious, delighted, and amazed. I will never again look or think of air the same way. Logan made air come alive and I can never again take all its aspects for granted.
February 18, 2026
Quirky, entertaining and informative. A much needed guide to the one element that we hardly ever think about.
January 24, 2017
Appropriately ethereal and illuminating
William Bryant Logan writes like an author from a different era — I imagine him as one of those 19th century polymaths, trudging over the English moors with a notebook and a telescope, discovering some new natural phenomenon — bringing the eye of a poet and the mind of a scientist to this wonderful book about air. Rather than a study grounded in chemical analysis, it is an ode buoyed aloft by personal observation. Like the topic he explores, the book is filled with secret currents and unexpected swirls of revelation. His approach ranges from topic to topic, and from the personal to the historic, all linked by a profound sense of wonder at the world around us, the air moving across it and the many life forms and processes that fill the invisible layer or otherwise depend upon it.
Some of my favorite moments included:
* paragliding spiders with, and this will give you nightmares, 100,000 spiders floating through the sky per acre over a four month period in one study plot
* the story of how weather forecasting ensured the success of the D-day landing for the Allied forces, thereby changing the course of WWII, as well as a rousing defense of disruptive, non-linear thinking
* how bats echolocate, and the strain on hearts — from bats to hummingbirds to vultures — to fly
* a detailed description of the microorganisms in a “finger’s worth’ of sand and how the biggest creatures in this little world (at a millimeter) are a thousand times bigger then the smallest (about half a micron in diameter), the same difference between a shrew and a whale
* a vivid look at how sap rises in trees, giving off the water and oxygen that sustain all life (if only we treated them as such), and the tiny networks of tubes made up of lines of cells stretching from root to leaf stomata
His writing is lyrical and powerful:
-- “Bats ask and the universe answers.”
-- “A song requires two things: breath and listener.”
-- “She was an expert in duty and in worry.” [About his mother]
-- “The only reason that the world is not awash in the dead is that the fungi return to the earth.”
This is a wonderful, non-linear and satisfying book organized around a single, fascinating topic. It will definitely blow me in the direction of his other books.
William Bryant Logan writes like an author from a different era — I imagine him as one of those 19th century polymaths, trudging over the English moors with a notebook and a telescope, discovering some new natural phenomenon — bringing the eye of a poet and the mind of a scientist to this wonderful book about air. Rather than a study grounded in chemical analysis, it is an ode buoyed aloft by personal observation. Like the topic he explores, the book is filled with secret currents and unexpected swirls of revelation. His approach ranges from topic to topic, and from the personal to the historic, all linked by a profound sense of wonder at the world around us, the air moving across it and the many life forms and processes that fill the invisible layer or otherwise depend upon it.
Some of my favorite moments included:
* paragliding spiders with, and this will give you nightmares, 100,000 spiders floating through the sky per acre over a four month period in one study plot
* the story of how weather forecasting ensured the success of the D-day landing for the Allied forces, thereby changing the course of WWII, as well as a rousing defense of disruptive, non-linear thinking
* how bats echolocate, and the strain on hearts — from bats to hummingbirds to vultures — to fly
* a detailed description of the microorganisms in a “finger’s worth’ of sand and how the biggest creatures in this little world (at a millimeter) are a thousand times bigger then the smallest (about half a micron in diameter), the same difference between a shrew and a whale
* a vivid look at how sap rises in trees, giving off the water and oxygen that sustain all life (if only we treated them as such), and the tiny networks of tubes made up of lines of cells stretching from root to leaf stomata
His writing is lyrical and powerful:
-- “Bats ask and the universe answers.”
-- “A song requires two things: breath and listener.”
-- “She was an expert in duty and in worry.” [About his mother]
-- “The only reason that the world is not awash in the dead is that the fungi return to the earth.”
This is a wonderful, non-linear and satisfying book organized around a single, fascinating topic. It will definitely blow me in the direction of his other books.
April 16, 2016
It's staggering to guess how much research went into this book. I challenge the next reader to find ANY subject that involves AIR in any way that's not addressed here. The result is a rather heavy book about what you think would be a light subject, but the fact is that air is everywhere. It's importance cannot be understated and the author does a great job of reminding you not to take it for granted.
Because it's such a broad subject, it's natural that some chapters will be more interesting than others. For me, I didn't connect with the discussions about microbes, music and art (very surprisingly) -- but I was fascinated by the information about pheromones, weather and war. As a birder and a traveler, the sections about aviation were sure to be a hit for me. I imagine any reader will find parts that are a slog and parts that are page-turners.
This was one of the first books I won in a First Reads giveaway and I'm embarrassed to say that it's taken me nearly four years to finish it. Unfortunately, it started with a long bit about bacteria and the like which didn't grab me and I kept shuffling the book down in my TBR pile. I encourage other readers to stick with it and power through slow spots because there's a lot to like between these pages.
Because it's such a broad subject, it's natural that some chapters will be more interesting than others. For me, I didn't connect with the discussions about microbes, music and art (very surprisingly) -- but I was fascinated by the information about pheromones, weather and war. As a birder and a traveler, the sections about aviation were sure to be a hit for me. I imagine any reader will find parts that are a slog and parts that are page-turners.
This was one of the first books I won in a First Reads giveaway and I'm embarrassed to say that it's taken me nearly four years to finish it. Unfortunately, it started with a long bit about bacteria and the like which didn't grab me and I kept shuffling the book down in my TBR pile. I encourage other readers to stick with it and power through slow spots because there's a lot to like between these pages.
August 27, 2016
A little too much whimsy mixed in with the science for my personal tastes. That said, for other readers it might be just the right combination. The author is clearly enamored of his topic and has taken great pains to range far and wide with his discussion of air. My personal preferences mean that the chapters on science (from atmosphere to microbes, from spores to weather, from the mechanics of flight to the wonders of respiration) were my favorite. Some of the other chapters (the sky as depicted in art, memory and the sense of smell, how we interact with sound), were hit or miss. I do not begrudge an author waxing poetic, but only to a point. Some of the science in these other chapters were interspersed with a bit too much personal narrative (I would have preferred more information and less memoir). Still, the author has an approachable (if occasionally overwrought) writing style and the book would read well for a layperson as he tries to make the science digestible.
May 26, 2015
I won this book through Goodreads giveaways. And I wasn't really sure was I was getting into but I really liked this book. It's actually very fascinating right from the start with the introduction. It's a poetic take to all of the science surrounding the air from how it works, what lives in it and how it affects all living things big and small. The author use personal stories, trivia, and historical events to weave together interesting stories and facts about the air in relation to so many other topics from fungus, to planes and natural disasters. This is truly a fascinating read filled to the brim with interesting details about the weather, animals and humans that you wont want to put it down.
February 15, 2015
I enjoyed Air: restless shaper of the world. If you are looking for an easy to read, "popular sciencey" book, I recommend:
Air: The Restless Shaper of the World by William Bryant Logan
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13...
"Air sustains the living. Every creature breathes to live, exchanging and changing the atmosphere. Water and dust spin and rise, make clouds and fall again, fertilizing the dirt. "
I checked Air out of the American library. The book consists of small chapters discussing air in many contexts: a newborn taking his/her 1st breath, global warming, air quality after 911, a person breaths an average of 600 million breaths in a life time, how the earth and moon developed, etc.
Happy reading.
Air: The Restless Shaper of the World by William Bryant Logan
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13...
"Air sustains the living. Every creature breathes to live, exchanging and changing the atmosphere. Water and dust spin and rise, make clouds and fall again, fertilizing the dirt. "
I checked Air out of the American library. The book consists of small chapters discussing air in many contexts: a newborn taking his/her 1st breath, global warming, air quality after 911, a person breaths an average of 600 million breaths in a life time, how the earth and moon developed, etc.
Happy reading.
September 14, 2012
This is an excellent book! I thoroughly enjoyed the book and never knew that air could be such a fascinating subject. Mr. Logan does a wonderful job of presenting the material in an easily understandable (though not "dumbed down") and enjoyable manner. I would me more than happy to read the finished version (I had received an advanced copy from Goodreads-Thanks!!!) and would be interested in reading his other books.
May 22, 2013
A kind of swirling meditation on air — weather, wind, spores and other travellers on the air, breath, hang gliding
4. MemoryWalk: Spruce Credit Union. As well watch the crew of a large pumper truck hooks a hose up to a coupling on the outside wall of the building and starts pumping some kind of gas. The building starts to inflate — bigger, bigger, bigger — until it floats off its foundations, pulls away from the hose and goes flying up into the sky.
4. MemoryWalk: Spruce Credit Union. As well watch the crew of a large pumper truck hooks a hose up to a coupling on the outside wall of the building and starts pumping some kind of gas. The building starts to inflate — bigger, bigger, bigger — until it floats off its foundations, pulls away from the hose and goes flying up into the sky.
May 24, 2014
This started well, but ultimately wasn't as good as it should've been. While some paragraphs were masterfully written, and make you think how a talented writer can make the mundane sound so magical, Logan also seems to stretch out certain recollections ponderously. While some of his anecdotes are unique and interesting, some are so only to him, but we are taken along for the ride.
June 28, 2013
One of those authors, like Simon Winchester, who gives you more than just science, but philosophy, theology, poetry, literary connections...and more. A really good read and he covered so many different, fascinating aspects of air.
June 18, 2012
got this thru first reads.
September 22, 2013
Informative, well written and a pleasure to read.
November 5, 2013
Interesting and absorbing, will need to read it again to take in everything. I found it uplifting.
March 24, 2014
The Author expands the subject of "Air" in an amazing way. It's composition, extent, movement, life supporting, ...
Very chatty style. Science for everyone.
Very chatty style. Science for everyone.
January 1, 2015
I won this book on Goodreads First Reads.
An interesting addition to any scientist's collection or fans of science.
An interesting addition to any scientist's collection or fans of science.
June 27, 2015
Definitely the boring-est of the Logan books I've read. I loved Oak and liked Dirt. I just didn't feel like I learned all that much reading Air.
May 26, 2022
This would probably make an interesting series of magazine articles, but had no coherent theme as a book.
January 15, 2024
What a wonderful dive into all around us -- and what makes light.
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