Full name: Air: The Restless Shaper of the World

Author: William Bryant Logan Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: Science Purchase/reserch links: Goodreads Amazon LibraryThing ISBNs: 9780393067989 039306798X

Air sustains the living. Every creature breathes to live, exchanging and changing the atmosphere. Water and dust spin and rise, make clouds and fall again, fertilizing the dirt. Twenty thousand fungal spores and half a million bacteria travel in a square foot of summer air. The chemical sense of aphids, the ultraviolet sight of swifts, a newborn's awareness of its mother's breast;all take place in the medium of air. Ignorance of the air is costly. The artist Eva Hesse died of inhaling her fiberglass medium. Thousands were sickened after 9/11 by supposedly "safe" air. The African Sahel suffers drought in part because we fill the air with industrial dusts. With the passionate narrative style and wide-ranging erudition that have made William Bryant Logan's work a touchstone for nature lovers and environmentalists, Air is "like the contents of a bag of seaborne dust that Darwin collected aboard the Beagle"; a treasure trove of discovery. Similar books: QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter by Richard P. Feynman Physics of the Impossible by Michio Kaku Black Holes and Time Warps by Kip S. Thorne Quantum Field Theory for the Gifted Amateur by Tom Lancaster Nightwatch by Terence Dickinson The Character of Physical Law by Richard P. Feynman Einstein and the Quantum by A. Douglas Stone The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil Universe by Martin Rees The Machinery of Life by David S. Goodsell The Music of the Primes by Marcus du Sautoy Theoretical Physics by Georg Joos Murmurs of Earth by Carl Sagan Understanding the Universe by Don Lincoln Power, Sex, Suicide by Nick Lane The Ocean World by Jacques-Yves Cousteau Every Day On Earth by Steve Murrie The Tangled Web by Michal Zalewski Nature's Building Blocks by John Emsley