Air-Borne

From the Baillie Gifford-shortlisted New York Times science columnist, the hidden biology of the air we breathe, from pollen to viruses such as COVID-19.

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"An extraordinary history of the perils and promise of every breath we take" James Nestor, New York Times bestselling author of Breath

"Another brilliant work from one of the very best science writers, Air-Borne will leave you agog at the incredible world that floats unseen around us" Ed Yong, New York Times bestselling author of An Immense World

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Every day we draw in two thousand gallons of air – and thousands of living things. From the ground to the stratosphere, the air teems with invisible life.

In Air-Borne, award-winning New York Times columnist and Baillie Gifford-shortlisted author Carl Zimmer leads us on an odyssey through the living atmosphere and through the history of its discovery. We follow Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh above the clouds, where they conducted groundbreaking experiments, and meet NASA scientists who send balloons even higher, to search for life in the stratosphere.

Zimmer chronicles the dark side of aerobiology with gripping accounts of how the United States and the Soviet Union clandestinely built arsenals of biological weapons designed to spread anthrax and smallpox. Air-Borne prompts us to look at the world with new eyes – as a place where the oceans and forests loft trillions of cells into the air, where microbes eat clouds, and where life soars thousands of miles on the wind.

Weaving together spellbinding history with the latest reporting on airborne threats to global health, this masterwork makes visible an invisible world.