As always Sam Kean impresses. Exquisitely interesting book about something that I never expected to be so fascinating, the air around us. As a future physician one part that I'll carry with me is that there are traceable numbers of leukemia and cancer deaths associated with the atomic bombs the United States tested in the '40s and '50s. It's wild that the scientists of that day never considered wind patterns and the true damage of what they were doing to future generations. Just another example of the shortsightedness of capitalism and US imperialism. This then pairs nicely with the ending of the book about how mankind's impact on the atmosphere will eventually have the same impact on the number of humans on Earth as the radioactivity from those tests has on the number of blood cells in some of the world citizens. I do agree with the author that humanity will probably use some contraption to try and limit the damage of climate change. I also agree with his thought that this will go terribly wrong. Maybe not the author's intention but I leave reading this book a little more confident in my personal idea that having children is unethical due to the bleak future we would give them. I recommend this book because of its exquisite history of how humankind has shaped the atmosphere around us, and it's finale and what our future might hold.

That's the goal of Caesar's Last Breath—to make these invisible stories of gases visible, so you can see them as clearly as you can see your breath on a crisp November morning. At various points in the book we'll swim with radioactive pigs in the ocean and hunt insects the size of dachshunds. We'll watch Albert Einstein struggle to invent a better refrigerator, and we'll ride shotgun with pilots unleashing top-secret "weather warfare" on Vietnam. We'll march with angry mobs, and be buried inside an avalanche of vapors so hot that people's brains boiled inside their skulls. All of these tales pivot on the surprising behavior of gases, gases from lava pits and the guts of microbes, from test tubes and car engines, from every corner of the periodic table. We still breathe most of them today, and each chapter in this book picks one of them as a lens to examine the sometimes tragic, sometimes farcical role that gases played in the human saga.

What I wouldn't give to write like Sam Kean. He informs as he entertains, and vice versa. In his hands, material as dry and stultifying as a high school Chemistry textbook becomes a narrative - and one that is clever, amusing, and energetic. This is his most recent title to date, and he has really improved on the already high-quality work he published before. Caesar's Last Breath leaps and bounds through what would seem a very limited topic but towards the end begins to grind with some of the wearying repetition and noncohesive threads that I found distracting in his earlier books.

4 stars out of 5, and very close to 4.5. It really is wonderful and Kean really is a great writer, but I would have liked it cut down by about 25 pages or so. I started skimming in the final sections, particularly the chapter about fallout which is presented in a way that makes it seem only tangentially related to gas laws.

An excellent specimen of the pop science books which seem to be more numerous by the day. In the tradition of books like Rain or Salt or the Soul of an Octopus, Kean focuses on one specific thing in the greater universe of science and uses it as a lens to tell stories about humanity and the world more broadly.

At first blush, a book about air or gases doesn't seem like it would be that interesting. But through air, Kean explores the story of the early earth, the Industrial Revolution, the climate change crisis and man's search for exoplanets in one fell swoop.

At each step, he focuses on individual constituent gases -- sulfur dioxide for the early earth, oxygen for a story about the scientific revolution, water for the industrial revolution, helium for manned flight, etc. But it's the human stories he tells that really do the work of pulling you through the book. Whether it's the stubborn old man who refused to leave the slope of Mount Saint Helen, the guy who turned his flatulence into a flourishing career, or the Manhattan Project scientists who couldn't help repeatedly killing themselves by blithely handling a "demon orb" of plutonium.

Kean is a great storyteller, and like all good books in this genre, you find yourself learning just by absorbing the great tales of human triumphs and follies.

My criticisms of the book are minor and perhaps unfair, so be prepared to take them with a grain of salt. In the first, I don't think Kean does a good enough job hammering home the philosophical point that really under-girds his title. It boggles the mind to think about how much of human history we are all consuming with each breath. It's an incredible thought experiment with the potential to really ground people in space and time and I feel like Kean is in such a rush to make the point and move on, that he never really lets the idea breath (ah hyuck). If you remember nothing else from this book, that should be it, and he just doesn't hammer the point home.

My other criticism is more political. Like most with a seemingly blind faith in science, Kean's overarching story feels like a retelling of the myth of human progress. By connecting the scientific and industrial revolutions to chapters about exploring space and terraforming other planet, he seems to be suggesting that sci-fi futures like this are inevitable. But I just don't see how he can square that with his professed skepticism in human nature, especially as it concerns the climate change problem. Isn't concerning yourself with the expansion of the sun a little premature when you don't even have confidence that humanity can survive as it does now for the next century?

But then, maybe Anthropocentrist optimism is a precondition for getting a book like this published. Who wants to be bum out their readers, after all?

Ah well, it doesn't undermine the pleasure that I took out of the book, but it does seem to add more to the "pop" side of the equation than any true scientific assessment. I'd still recommend the book, but all the good it will do helping to expand your mind and consciousness of the gaseous whirlwind about us all.

I was thinking this was going to be more of a geology/atmosphere book, but was not disappointed when this book went into the discovery of different gases, how chemicals make up the atmosphere, and the revolutions in technology that these chemicals and discoveries precipitated. There are also many asides which are interesting and funny. I liked this book.

This is more like 4.5 stars for me. This is by far Sam Kean's best book since The Disappearing Spoon. This book deals with science that is more "settled" and well understood. There is more about history and less about what we still have to learn than in The Violinist's Thumb or Dueling Neurosurgeons.

The nominal unifying theme is "gases" which is sufficiently vague to allow just about any possible subject the author finds interesting. As such, there is not really a unifying theme, but this did not detract from the book. Each section is very interesting and stands on its own just fine.

I especially liked most of the "interludes" between chapters which were short accounts of interesting incidents or stories. The thing that kept me from going to 5 stars was the attempt to was poetic about the meaning and significance of gases (as hinted at by the title). He really tries to make the reader get "caught up" thinking about the interconnectedness of all things through the role of gases. This is very silly and unnecessary. Sam: I appreciated your book because it was interesting; just let that be enough without shamelessly begging me to care on some deeper emotional level.

Once again, Sam Kean doesn't disappoint. He brilliantly pulls in stories from history about both abstract and well known figures to weave an entertaining and informative book. I'm not sure what I expected this book to be about and after finishing it, I'm still not sure how I would summarize it. It ranges laughing gas to dynamite to hurricanes but although possibly not coherent in a list I never found myself bored in any individual topic so I guess it doesn't much matter.

Excellent book. Probably too meandering for some, but I love the intersections of science with human interest and history.

I adore his writing: clearly explaining fairly complex processes without getting dry (and generally with a wink and a nod*), helping visualize brain boggling numbers, giving historical context, and never talking down to the reader, all mixed with serious appreciation of irony, wry words here and there, and a certain goofy sense of humor. Oh, and he tells you what really went down at Roswell. (Really.)

*But* if you're the anxious sort, really anxiety inducing. So be warned. Opening with all the ways to die by volcano made me have to put this down for a few weeks. Chemical warfare and experimentation, down for another week. Inhuman (all too human-animals can't come up with this shit) military actions, how much radiation we're breathing in at any given moment, the likelihood that we've utterly fucked ourselves already...Yeah.

*He has wonderful funny, snide, and occasionally terrifying endnotes. This is a science writer for Pratchett Fans.**

**And sometimes his endnotes have footnotes to check his site for yet more detours.