Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art - Hardcover

Nestor, James

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0241289076 ISBN 13: 9780241289075

Publisher: Penguin Life, 2020

Synopsis

300,000 years ago, Homo sapiens had bigger skulls. Cooked food meant our heads shrunk; alongside a growing brain, our airways got narrower. Urbanisation then led us to breathe less deeply and less healthily. And so today more than 90% of us breathe incorrectly. So we might have been breathing all our life, but we need to learn how to breathe properly!

In Breath, James Nestor meets cutting-edge scientists at Harvard and experiments on himself in labs at Stanford to see the impact of bad breathing. He revives the lost, and recently scientifically proven, wisdom of swim coaches, Indian mystics, stern-faced Russian cardiologists, Czechoslovakian Olympians and New Jersey choral conductors - the world's foremost 'pulmonauts' - to show how breathing in specific patterns can trigger our bodies to absorb more oxygen, and he explains the benefits for everyone that result, from staying healthy and warding off anxiety to improving focus and losing weight.

Breath is a fascinating ride through evolution, medicine and physiology - and extreme sports. But mostly it explores you. Structured as a journey with chapters from the mouth and nose through to the lungs and nervous system, it is non-fiction at its breath-taking best.

About this title

Review

The reader could not wish for a better guide. . . DEEP is a fascinating, informative, exhilarating book, and I wager, it will at the very least have you testing how long you can hold your breath (Wall Street Journal, on DEEP)

Truly breathtaking. . . Nestor gets right in with the competitors and rogue scientists who are unearthing mysteries of the deep and its inhabitants that we can't even imagine, in a book that's engaging and eye-popping (Esquire, on DEEP)

Fascinating. . . DEEP is beautiful and terrifying, brutal and hopeful. Nestor pulls us below the surface into a world far beyond imagining and opens our eyes to these unseen places (Dallas Morning News, on DEEP)

The deeper the book ventures into the ocean, the more dramatic and unusual the organisms therein and the people who observe them. . . Through Nestor's eyes and his stories, it's a journey well worth taking (David Epstein New York Times Book Review, on DEEP)

With a "wow" on every page, and brimming with vivid portraits, lucid scientific explanations, gripping (and funny) first-person accounts, and urgent facts about the ocean's endangerment, Nestor's DEEP is galvanizing, enlightening, and invaluable (Booklist, starred review, on DEEP)

With verve and humor, the author describes his own risk-taking attempts to understand the ocean's ancient secrets and the daring and brilliant people who have dedicated their lives to probing deeper. . . Nestor's writing is sharp, colorful, and thrilling. . . An adventurous and frequently dazzling look at our planet's most massive habitat (Kirkus Reviews, on DEEP)

DEEP is beguiling and profoundly informative book that reminds us, on every page, that our Earth
is still awash in mystery and wonder

(Jon Mooallem, author of Wild Ones, on DEEP)

Put DEEP on the top of your reading list. The book will do for the oceans what Cosmos did for space. It's mind-bending, intrepid, and inspiring (Po Bronson, on DEEP)

About the Author

James Nestor has written for Scientific American, Outside Magazine, Men's Journal, National Public Radio, The New York Times, and more. His book, DEEP: Freediving, Renegade Science, and What The Ocean Tells Us About Ourselves, was a Finalist for the PEN American Center Best Sports Book of the Year and a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. In 2015 Nestor received a MacArthur Foundation grant to develop a short documentary, The Click Effect, for The New York Times.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Life
• Publication date: 2020
• ISBN 10: 0241289076
• ISBN 13: 9780241289075
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 304