Book Review: Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art (2020). James Nestor.

This is an entire book on something we all usually take for granted: breathing. 

The author has previously reported on deep-sea “free” divers, who can descend to great depths and stay submerged while holding their breath for long periods of time.  As a result of what he learned in researching the divers, and because of his own health issues, particularly around respiration and nasal congestion, he went on a personal search for more knowledge about this essential and largely automatic human function.  

In the course of the book, he describes many historical and contemporary religious and exercise disciplines that focus on control of breathing as the key to other health, mental and spiritual attainments, and his own experiments in using these techniques to improve his breathing.  

He reveals other intriguing facts too.  One was that the structure of human skulls, and the size and shape of our breathing passages in the nose and mouth, as well as the health of our teeth and jaws, have changed for the worse at two points in human evolution:  first, about 10,000 years ago, when the agricultural revolution began, and humans stopped having to chew their food as hard, and even more dramatically about 300 years ago, with the introduction of soft breads and manufactured food that further softened most of the food in our diets.  Who knew?

In any event, it’s a fascinating tour of the complex role that breathing plays in our health and happiness, and how we can alter and improve our breathing by revisiting techniques that have been known across many human cultures since ancient times. Recommended.

Book Review: Hidden Figures (2016). Margot Lee Shatterly.

This is the eye-opening book on which the outstanding movie Hidden Figures (2016) was based.  It’s the inspirational story of the young black women mathematicians, mostly math teachers from the south, who played a key role in aeronautical R&D for the U.S. in World War II, and then went on to play similarly vital (and previously unknown) roles in the early space program with NASA.  

The story illuminates the stark contrast between their abilities, dedication, patriotism and successes in a professional and technical world once assumed to be the exclusive domain of white men from elite universities, and the lives they lived as second class citizens due to the way blacks and women were treated in American society.  Highly recommended.

Book Review: Lifespan: Why We Age and Why We Don't Have To (2019). David A. Sinclair, PhD, AO, with Matthew D. LaPlante.

The author of this book is one of the leading academic and medical experts on aging and life extension research in the world, with dual appointments as head of aging research labs at Harvard Medical School, and at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.  

The book makes a case for the fact of still-increasing lifespans around the world (at least for some of the population), and that our rapid acquisition of new science and information is opening the possibility of beginning to extend the possible outer limits of how long people can live a healthy and fulfilling life, way out beyond any previous possibilities.  

He discusses many facets of the topic of life extension, including concerns about overpopulation, the ethics of who can afford to get access to life-extension treatments, the roles of lifestyle, foods and diets, common supplements and treatments that can play a significant role in extending healthy life, but also the role that current scientific research is about to play in providing dramatic new biotech-based medical treatments to ward off “the disease of aging”.  

For Sinclair, aging should be viewed as a disease, indeed the primary human disease.  In his view, most of the other conditions and sicknesses of old age are simply symptoms of the breakdown in the body’s ability to repair cellular damage that accumulates over time.  

This book is very long, and has way too much advanced biology in it for me to thoroughly evaluate his every conclusion, but based on his international recognition as a scientist and his professional credentials, I take his writing on this topic seriously.  A very interesting treatise on the “state of the art” in an area of medical research that could cause revolutionary changes to our view of human lives and expectations in the near future.  Recommended.