Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe in Science and Inquiry

Sep 02, 2025 Cindy rated it liked it

Shelves: own_au, science, non-fiction, health-and-or-food

My two big gripes about this unbalanced book: the first is the choice of narrative focus while the second failure is downright dangerous.

You should take the sub-title of this book seriously: "The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe." I was expecting a broader overview of the science and history of the study of the transmission of airborne stuff: particulates, pollens, molecules, bacteria, viruses, etc. This book is very heavy on the history, and almost exclusively focuses on airborne pathogen My two big gripes about this unbalanced book: the first is the choice of narrative focus while the second failure is downright dangerous.

You should take the sub-title of this book seriously: "The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe." I was expecting a broader overview of the science and history of the study of the transmission of airborne stuff: particulates, pollens, molecules, bacteria, viruses, etc. This book is very heavy on the history, and almost exclusively focuses on airborne pathogens. The unevenness is not just the what but the who. It's as if Zimmer had almost written a biography of William Wells (with his wife Martha Wells only as his sidekick), but didn't quite want to commit. A huge chunk of the book is devoted to this complicated misanthrope, which gets very grating. Yes, he was hard headed and difficult to work with, we get it.

But more egregious to me is Zimmer's dogged commitment to telling the history of aerobiology in strict chronological order. This means it is an exercise left to the reader as to which side of the historic scientific debates is understood as accurate today. As an example, a lesser-informed reader bringing their own baggage to the book might assume that masks absolutely didn't help during the 1918 flu pandemic, because of the way the information is presented.

In good science communication, particularly when dealing with historical debates that have real-world consequences, the story should always inform the reader about the current understanding, even if the answer is nuanced. You get a sense from the final chapters dealing with the 2020 SARS-COV2 pandemic what that answer might be, but yet again, Zimmer doesn't want to take sides. It's pretty enraging.

I want to be sure I mention a few of the good parts, and what I learned. Zimmer presents a compelling argument why aerobiology as a bonafide scientific discipline never really found a strong identity. The in-fighting and personality clashes has hampered and continues to hamper the field, and leads to experts scattered across other related disciplines. This, in turn, leads to poorly disseminated research, ineffective communication, and assumptions when the science is outside of an author's discipline. In addition, the descriptions of the clever experiments done 100+ years ago were very fun and compelling.

Overall, though, I don't think I can recommend this book. ...more

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