Gasp!: The Swift and Terrible Beauty of Air (ISBN 1593761406)

How We Got To Understand Air, And To Ruin It:
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.

Today I am not taking breathing for Granted.:
I am a Joe Sherman fan. Gasp! is, by far, Mr. Sherman's best cultural history to date. This book can be read as a history of cultural perceptions, a meditation on the element we take most for granted, or a demand for social responsibility in an increasingly toxic world. Mr. Sherman at heart is neither a fiction, nor non-fiction writer. He is a cultural narrator. Part historian, common-sense speaker and fabulist with Gasp! he invites the reader to join him in a wrestling match with Air. He extracts specific and telling details and riffs both on the facts that underlie them, and the possible consequences they leave for us living in a Tailpipe World. I have read several of his previous books including: 'Charging Ahead', 'In the Rings of Saturn' and 'Fast Lane down a Dirt Road'. These previous books all explored odd and specific topics as metaphors for our culture and times. Electric Car Innovations, GM's Business Unit of Saturn and the 20th Century History of Vermont are topics which Mr. Sherman converted into stories unfolding larger cultural and social truths. In Gasp! he reversed his usual manner process and come away with a stunning book. Instead of a strange and specific topic being explored as windows into larger social forces, Joe undertakes the entire history and scope of the atmosphere. It worked. Somehow, it worked. Mr. Sherman has left me aware and pondering of every inhaled breath as chemical process, spiritual process and an underappreciated act of biological chance. Joe draws on an incredable knowledge of the Automobile Industry, cultural history and the sciences to this book a wonderful read. This book is part Social History, Science History, and a meditation on a common-sense need for environmental awareness. If John McPhee and Studs Turkel had collaborated on work about the Air, it might be something like this book. But for those who have read him before, it is definitely the strange and insightful Joe Sherman writing this work. This book is some his best writing. Somethign to be thankful fo. Last night, Mr. Bush the leading supporter of the Clear Skies Act, won the election. Unable to sleep, I instead finished Gasp! Placing Mr. Bush's 'Clear Skies' into the context of Mr. Sherman's 'Gasp!' is something worthwhile for anyone who would care to better understand the Air and our relationships to it.

Take a deep breath:
When you do, after reading this book you will be vividly aware of what is passing through your nostrils and into your lungs. You will have learned where the air you're breathing orginated, what assaults it's been subject to, and what you may have to do to improve it. The air you, and your children, breathe needs attention. This passionately written account examines the history of air, the people who have investigated it and the problems we're confronting in keeping it breathable. Although the story grows increasingly grim as it progresses, Sherman finds ways of offering some hope and solutions. Air means breathing and Sherman laments his failure to see his son's initial breath. There were distractions - a Caesarean birth and the condition of Sherman's wife. A forgiveable lapse, one hopes. From that incident, however, the author derived a deeper interest in the air we, and his wife and son, respire. Air, transparent and ephemeral, still captured the interest and imagination of early thinkers. Aristotle's famous dictum of the four basic "elements" placed air after earth in importance. Few doubted that air was essential to life, however. Although the air was thought to hold things like spirits and deities, actual investigation of air didn't come about until the Enlightenment. Shedding the myths, people like Lavoisier, Dalton and others detected "new aire" and the idea of air comprised of several gases began to emerge. More than one experimenter put his life at risk investigating the properties of oxygen, nitrogen and carbon dioxide. Even with the new studies, the long-standing idea of the air containing "phlogiston" as evidence of burning was not easily dismissed. Although all life has its effect on air, whether taking it in for use or expelling waste gases through breathing and less polite means, Sherman is most concerned with humanity's influence on our "breathable sphere". He offers a long discourse on the impact of various forms of smoke, particularly coal. In the Industrial Revolution, coal smoke was a sign of "progress", new wealth, restructured society with urban growth and gainful employment. That attitude carried across the Atlantic to the USA as industrialisation progressed there. As smoke and various other pollutants began choking the cities, objectors arose. Movements to curb smoke were organised, with minimal success. Britain's problem was exacerbated by the onset of fog. When combined with coal dust and smoke, the results were devastating. A Public Health Act was one of the first serious attempts to address the problem. Although the Act listed many noxious vapours, enforcement was lax and largely ineffectual. With similar problems emerging in the United States, opposition grew apace. Again, smoke and "progress" equated. There, however, the incipient women's rights movements made clean air one of its subsidiary themes. Concern for public health generally and children's health in particular, brought many women into the fold. One businessman, W.P. Rend, declared smoke to be the "incense burning on the alter of industry". With other industrialists and many politicians echoing this sentiment, those seeking cleaner air through legislation faced firm resistance. While some progress was achieved, the onset of the automobile created a fresh problem. The USA's love affair with cars has been well documented. Sherman traces the rise of "smog" in the Los Angeles basin and the halting attempts to curtail it. One thing was certain, people weren't about to reduce car use and the problem could only be addressed at the factory with new means of curbing emitted compounds. The impact of such regulation hasn't kept the USA from being the planet's greatest polluter. Sherman's answer is necessarily a little weak. Although he's covered the Western world, it is his own nation that provides the readership he wishes to convince. He wants his fellow-countrymen to be aware they inhale 19 thousand times per day. "What enters your nostrils and lungs each time?", he queries. Think of the dust, mites, bacteria and chemicals carried on that air into your body. He reminds us that there are delicate membranes in the lung, which, if spread out fully would cover a football field. That very expanse means a thin membrane easily affronted. It takes little effort to damage the lung. And those inside your rib cage can only be taken care of by their owner. \ostephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada\c

One clean breath...:
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.

A must read for anyone who breathes!:
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.