Editions

Caesar's Last Breath

Caesar's Last Breath

  • The Epic Story of The Air Around Us

** GUARDIAN SCIENCE BOOK OF THE YEAR 2017 **

‘Popular science at its best’
Mail on Sunday

‘Eminently accessible and enjoyable’
Observer

With every breath, you literally inhale the history of the world. On the ides of March, 44 BC, Julius Caesar died of stab wounds in the Roman Senate, but the story of his last breath is still unfolding. In fact, you're probably inhaling some of it now. Of the sextillions of molecules entering or leaving your lungs at this moment, some might also bear traces of Cleopatra's perfumes, German mustard gas, particles exhaled by dinosaurs or emitted by atomic bombs, even remnants of stardust from the universe's creation.

In Caesar’s Last Breath, New York Times bestselling author Sam Kean takes us on a journey through the periodic table, around the globe and across time to tell the epic story of the air we breathe.

Reviews

  • Absorbing, entertaining... provocative but compelling... eminently accessible and enjoyable. A real gas - in short!

    Robin McKie, Observer

  • Funny, clever and altogether effervescent... Kean writes superbly about science itself... A joy for any reader

    James McConnachie, The Sunday Times

  • There is no denying the pleasure and indeed the wealth of scientific information to be obtained from reading Caesar’s Last Breath. It will change forever the way I think about breathing.

    Financial Times

  • Kean is the teacher you wish you'd had: genial, companionable and infectiously enthusiastic. This is an entertaining and accessible guide to the mysterious vapour of gases. Popular science at its best.

    Simon Humphreys, Mail on Sunday

  • It’s a helluva read. And it’s a gas.

    Tim Radford, The Guardian

More from this Author

About the Author

Sam Kean

Sam Kean spent years collecting mercury from broken thermometers as a child and now he is a writer in Washington DC. His work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Mental Floss, Slate, Air & Space/Smithsonian and New Scientist. In 2009 he was a runner-up for the National Association of Science Writers' Evert Clark/Seth Payne Award for best science writer under the age of thirty. He currently writes for Science. His first book, The Disappearing Spoon, was a New York Times bestseller and was shortlisted for the Royal Society's Winton Prize for science writing.

Sam Kean

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