Air The Restless Shaper of the World

by Logan, William Bryant

• ISBN13: 9780393067989
• ISBN10: 039306798X
• Edition: 00
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-08-20
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Summary

Air sustains the living. Every creature breathes to live, exchanging and changing the atmosphere. Water and dust spin and rise, make clouds and fall again, fertilizing the dirt. Twenty thousand fungal spores and half a million bacteria travel in a square foot of summer air. The chemical sense of aphids, the ultraviolet sight of swifts, a newborn's awareness of its mother's breast-all take place in the medium of air. Ignorance of the air is costly. The artist Eva Hesse died of inhaling her fiberglass medium. Thousands were sickened after 9/11 by supposedly safe air. The African Sahel suffers drought in part because we fill the air with industrial dusts. With the passionate narrative style and wide-ranging erudition that have made William Bryant Logan's work a touchstone for nature lovers and environmentalists, Air is-like the contents of a bag of seaborne dust that Darwin collected aboard the Beagle-a treasure trove of discovery.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. xi
Introduction	p. 1
Floating
Darwin's Dust	p. 24
The Spore Sucker	p. 33
Where Fungi Are	p. 48
Splash, Fire, Blow, Fling	p. 50
The Ergot of the Rye	p. 59
Lifted, Lofted, and Living	p. 63
The Pollen Rain	p. 66
Invisible Cities	p. 71
Is the Furniture Poison?	p. 76
The Air after 9/11	p. 82
Spinning
Weaving	p. 90
Vortices	p. 99
Ground Truth	p. 108
El Greco's Clouds	p. 115
The Big Mistake	p. 122
The Forecasters	p. 128
The Weather on D-Day	p. 139
Forcing	p. 146
The Winds	p. 152
Firestorm	p. 162
Flying
Dragged Aloft	p. 168
Saab in Flight	p. 171
The Common Crane	p. 174
Stall Practice	p. 181
The Bat, the Bee, the Bar-Headed Goose	p. 192
The Lee Wave	p. 201
The Wind Riders	p. 205
What Now?	p. 216
Telling
The Wilderness of Pheromones	p. 226
Mother and Child Communion	p. 233
Allure	p. 237
The Atmosphere of the Beloved	p. 243
Zooming In	p. 248
Aphids in the Invisible World	p. 255
The Bolas Spider	p. 258
Calling
What Is Sound?	p. 262
Parrot Duets	p. 267
Tfce Answered Question	p. 272
Nothing in It but What Goes through It	p. 277
Enchanted	p. 282
Sonata Form and Chaos	p. 289
The Aeolian Harp	p. 295
Breathing
The Tarpon's Breath	p. 300
Fenchel's Dance	p. 305
The Quantity of Breath	p. 312
Fogging the Mirror	p. 322
Shall These Bones Live?	p. 328
Shining
Why the Daytime Sky Is Light	p. 336
There Is Only One Sun	p. 338
The Sap Rising	p. 342
The Air Is a Slow Cold Flame	p. 348
Notes	p. 352
Bibliography	p. 370
Index	p. 385
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