Every breath you take

Engaging book on the air around us a breezy summer read

Reviewed by Sheilla Jones

Winnipge Free Press, August 5, 2017, Books, D17

Caesar’s Last Breath: Decoding the Secrets of the Air Around Us

By Sam Kean

Little, Brown and Company, 384 pages, $37

We may be far more deeply connected to each other than we imagine.

This idea was driven home when I was studying Hubble Telescope images of ancient, hot stars at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, England. Those distant stars, which no longer would have existed because of the time it takes light to travel from there to here, were some of the furnaces creating the elements of our universe. Cataclysmic explosions and supernova events would have sent those elements swirling out into space in vast clouds of dust and debris until they congealed into planets like Earth, providing the building blocks of physical life. We literally are stardust, sharing molecular remnants of ancient stars. But we are even more intimately entangled by the air that we breathe.

For instance, is it true that you are personally entangled, at this very moment, with the murder of Julius Caesar? South Dakota-born science writer Sam Kean says yes, you are, because every breath you take contains some of the same air exhaled by Julius in his dying gasp in Rome, 44 BC.

"When you crunch the numbers," he writes in his latest book, Caesar’s Last Breath: Decoding the Secrets of the Air Around Us, "you’ll find that roughly one particle of ‘Caesar air’ will appear in your next breath… Think about that. Across the distance of time and space, a few of the molecules that danced inside his lungs are dancing inside of yours right now."

And given that a person breathes about 20,000 times a day, Kean notes, those many thousands of shared particles mean "you and Julius are practically kissing cousins."

The reason this can happen is because a single breath contains an extremely large number of molecules (10 to the power of 22, or ten sextillion). Those particles eventually are distributed throughout Earth’s atmosphere over a period of about two years. It means that everyone who ever lived and breathed before 2015 is part of us now. Molecules from Isaac Newton’s gasp when that apple fell would have been part of Martin Luther King Jr. declaring "I have a dream," and in Jonathan Toews’ shouted "Woo-ha!" as he hoisted the 2013 Stanley Cup over his head. We share it all.

The point of Caesar’s Last Breath, Kean says, is to make invisible air visible. "Pure air is colourless and (ideally) odourless, and by itself, it sounds like nothing. That doesn’t mean it’s mute, that it has no voice. It’s burning to tell its story."

Kean, the 37-year-old author of American bestsellers The Disappearing Spoon, The Violinist’s Thumb and The Tale of Dueling Neurosurgeons, does an entertaining job of telling that story. However, he does veer suddenly between seemingly unconnected topics.

In the first chapter of Caesar’s Last Breath, for example, he shifts from describing how volcanoes created Earth’s atmosphere (over and over again due to asteroid strikes blowing the atmosphere away) to the tale of a 1930s bootlegger who had taken refuge up Mount St. Helens.

Why do we really need to know that the old curmudgeon drove a pink Cadillac, swore like a trooper, favoured Schenley whiskey and won international celebrity status when he refused to leave the rumbling mountain in 1980?

Is Kean succumbing to the annoying "Simon Winchester effect" of needing to incorporate every little fascinating but peripheral side story into his tale?

It turns out getting to know old Harry Truman (the bootlegger, not the former U.S. president) is a setup for describing the poor man’s demise when Mount St. Helens finally erupted and sent a massive cloud of supercharged gases sweeping down the mountain.

Truman would have had barely a minute to watch the devastation racing toward him before his Cadillac exploded, Kean says, "and then Truman himself would have sublimed in the most scientific sense — transformed from solid to spirit almost instantly. And with that final hiss, he would have risen up into the air, joining the wider atmosphere."

And he’s now part of your next breath, too.

Hang in there when Kean seems to veer off on a tangent from the story he’s telling — whether it’s about Alfred Nobel’s deadly nitroglycerin tests, farting performances at the Moulin Rouge or weaponizing ice crystals in clouds. He’s making a point in his own roundabout way.

Caesar’s Last Breath has a lighter tone than Kean’s other books; he employs more humour and casual profanity, as if to show science doesn’t need to be stuffy and full of jargon.

This book is an engaging summer read and worth becoming entangled.

Sheilla Jones is a Winnipeg writer and author of The Quantum Ten: A Story of Passion, Tragedy, Ambition and Science. Her website at sheillajones.com is composed of 100 per cent recycled electrons, and she has no idea who or what they might have gotten tangled up with in the past.