Gasp! The Swift and Terrible Beauty of Air [Hardcover]

Joe Sherman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 30, 2004

From a baby's first breath—that universal and fundamental entry into life outside the womb—air is taken for granted. Joe Sherman's Gasp is an entertaining investigation of air and the discoveries of how it works in the body and in our world. Inhale, and learn about the difference between your aerobic capacity and Lance Armstrong's; exhale, and follow the observation and science of the atmosphere from Aristotle to Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen; hold your breath and investigate why over the last two centuries air has transformed from something marvelous into something menacing. In Gasp, Pulitzer Prize nominee Joe Sherman blends the history and myths of air, together with its environmental and physiological effects, into a rich and sometimes troubling account of what gives us our life force. It is a fascinating look at this vital, complex substance and its place in history, myth and everyday life.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Writing in an informal, sometimes charming tone, Sherman (In the Rings of Saturn) offers a wide range of material about the air we breathe. He explains the way the body processes oxygen (and looks at why some babies have difficulty taking their first breath). Then he explores scientists' growing understanding of air through the centuries, from Aristotle, who believed that the Earth literally exhaled vapors that, when trapped below Earth's surface, became metals, to the 18th-century French chemist Lavoisier, who unseated phlogiston in favor of oxygen as the part of air that caused fire. But even as air was being studied, Sherman says, global forces were making it less breathable. The author describes the killer fogs that engulfed London in the 19th century due to the mass burning of coal; the Germans' use of chlorine gas at Ypres in WWI; and nuclear testing, which has devastated air quality in many areas of the world. Sherman also provides an overview of regulatory attempts to create a healthier environment, from the efforts of Victorian-era feminists who promoted pure air to the troubled history of the Clean Air Act in the U.S. In a thoughtful and engaging manner, and without writing like an environmental polemicist, Sherman sheds light on a substance that is becoming more and more opaque.
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Review

"Like his subject, Joe Sherman's prose is at turns calm or gusty, playful, hot, chilling, lucid, breezy, or furious as a hurricane. Mostly, Gasp! will make you think hard about the miracle of the air we breathe, how it came to be, and what we are doing to it... With Gasp!, Sherman... establishes himself as a first-rate writer of popular science... Gasp! is a tour de force, a wondrous romp through this magical substance we breathe." -- Mark Pendergrast --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Counterpoint (August 30, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1593760256
• ISBN-13: 978-1593760250
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,972,056 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One clean breath..., November 19, 2004

By 

Michael Levitin "voyager" (Berlin) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Gasp! The Swift and Terrible Beauty of Air (Hardcover)

Oxygen may not strike you as a lively protagonist for a book. Think again.

In a masterfully inventive biography of air, Joe Sherman weaves between geology and history, myth and science, to retrace our understanding of life's most precious gas.

From the Ionian philosophers of ancient Greece to the eccentric chemists and scientists who tested daringly with air through the Renaissance, Enlightenment and Industrial eras, Sherman invokes a lively, little known chapter in Western history.

He also explores myths in Hindu, Maori and Viking culture, showing the ways societies tried to make sense of the invisible gas that surrounded and sustained them.

In "GASP!," Sherman--whose non-fiction book on General Motors, "In the Rings of Saturn," was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize--blames the auto industry, weak government policies and America's obsession with cars as key factors tilting the scales of climate change towards disaster.

But "myth came before science and will outlast it" he writes in a meditative, vaguely hopeful tone. After narrating a 20th century atmosphere filled with germ warfare, radioactive pollution, smog and global warming, hope is about all we have left.

Read this timely homage to air--and make sure you take a few deep breaths.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A must read for anyone who breathes!, November 10, 2004

By 

Barbara L. Page (Ventura, California) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Gasp! The Swift and Terrible Beauty of Air (Hardcover)

I found GASP to be invaluable in telling the story of air "up close and personal." After 17 years in the air quality biz, I was stunned to find out facts I never knew about this much ignored but vital natural resource. From its cosmic beginnings to current techno solutions to air pollution, GASP reads like a biography, with air as its mysterious main character - - unpredictable, brooding and misunderstood. This book brings air down to earth; it makes us want to do things in our own lives to protect "one clean breath" for future generations. Bravo Mr. Sherman on a thorough and fascinating presentation.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars How We Got To Understand Air, And To Ruin It, January 24, 2005

By 

R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Gasp! The Swift and Terrible Beauty of Air (Hardcover)

Among the big problems with air is that it is invisible (with luck) and that we don't have to pay for it. We get to regard with specific attention the food we buy, and if you don't like the tap water you pay for, you can always spring for bottled. Air, on the other hand, is taken for granted, and you usually don't even think of even one of the 19,000 breaths you take every day. Like any other big subject we don't think about, air is hugely complicated, but in _Gasp! The Swift and Terrible Beauty of Air_ (Shoemaker & Hoard), Joe Sherman has covered the topic fully in many different ways. He writes, "Understanding air, which is both big and amorphous, and small and right in front of you, demands a few mental oscillations." He makes the oscillations fun, from basic principles of gas exchange within your lungs to the different gods of the sky people have believed in to the evolution of our planet's atmosphere to the current worries about pollution and global warming. As if the subject isn't big enough, he has taken many discursive asides; he just has so many facts he has to disclose to the reader, but his grasp of his subject is sure and his ability to convey complexities in understandable terms is excellent.

Much of the book is devoted to the history of our understanding about the air and the thinkers who have tried to break down the invisible to see what it was made of. For instance, in 1648, the mathematician Blaise Pascal repeated the experiments of Torricelli with the new invention, the barometer. Not only did he check air pressure at the bottom of a tower stairs and at the top, he went to the mountains to try the effect. Pascal reasoned that air would weigh less and less the further one ascended, eventually winding up in a void. This sounds sensible to us, but it was anathema to the church; if there was a vacuum way up there, there was no Aristotelian scheme of higher spheres, especially the one that was where God lived. Pascal's ideas were attacked by the Jesuits. Lavoisier and Priestley eventually helped do away with the concept of phlogiston when they discovered oxygen, but the air explorers were not just at work in their labs. There is Other chemists took to the air in hot-air balloons and later hydrogen balloons. In 1862, Henry Coxwell and James Glaisher rode their basket gondola beneath a hot-air balloon to become the first to reach the stratosphere. Their altimeter indicated that they had reached 35,000 feet, but like most of the equipment and procedures of the flight, it went wildly wrong. They had a truly heroic battle against cold and a new malaise, altitude sickness, that imperiled their judgement and their lives.

The universe has spent a long time producing our atmosphere, and Sherman starts from the Big Bang to the Cambrian explosion of half a billion years ago, when oxygen was boosted to current atmospheric levels by plants, enabling the eventual takeover of the land by animals. The final third of _Gasp!_ is devoted to our very recent destruction of the atmosphere that was so long in coming. He has lived in Los Angeles, and he has written before about American car culture, and he is disdainful of how little attention governments in general, and our government in particular, are paying to air's problems. The phasing out of Freon and other such chemicals because of their destruction of the ozone layer that protects us from the ultraviolet is actually an environmental success story. Sherman shows, however, that just as in the current debate over global warming, such anti-regulation politicians as Tom DeLay insisted in 1995 that banning chemicals that destroy the ozone layer was all based on dubious science. The current administration is eager to relax rules that might bother business, and has wanted to relax pro-ozone rules as well, despite the documented reaccumulation of ozone since the rules were enforced. Profit-making corporations, Sherman shows, have a good history of making profits, and a bad one of serving public health. We have industrial (especially automotive) pollutants and the potential for weather changes that are going to reshape civilization; but he reminds us that "Clean air is about as public a concern as it is possible to imagine." It might be that corporations will get eager to forego profits for health, and it might be that government will get eager to draw up rules to make this happen; but don't hold your breath.