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.