I confess that I approached Debra Hendrickson’s The Air They Breathe: A Pediatrician on the Frontlines of Climate Change with a twinge of trepidation. I feared that it would expose a small chink in my proudly liberal bona fides. Yes, I consider climate change to be a critically important issues of the day, and yes, I recognize that appealing to people’s desire to offer the best to their children can be a powerful political motivator. But still, if I may first indulge myself...
...I have these vestigial Boomer memories of a childhood lived with both perils and freedom that in today’s world might be considered irresponsible. In my earliest 1960s boyhood, the seat belt in our car was my mother’s hand shooting off the steering wheel and straight-arming across my body if she needed to brake suddenly (once, she was too late and I did indeed smash my mouth against the dashboard.) I had all manner of dangerous toys. There was the original Mr. Potato Head, which did not include a plastic potato. Instead, it was a collection of body parts fastened to the end of sharp, inch-long metal spikes that you would stick into a real potato or other vegetable, or sometimes into your finger or palm, and then leave the amusing creation to sit rotting in your bedroom. There was the original ThingMaker Creepy Crawlies, basically an unprotected waffle iron you would place on your bedroom floor, heat to 400 degrees, fill molds with different colors of a noxious and slightly toxic plastic goop, and bake your own rubbery insects. My skateboard was of the pre-plastic wheel era. While today’s plastic wheels can shapeshift right over small debris, the wooden wheels of yesteryear would be brought to a screeching halt by the tiniest bit of sidewalk gravel embedding in them; I was sent flying through the air to smash and scrape along the concrete many times.
In my boyhood, I climbed trees far from the sight of any passersby. Unobserved, I climbed local hills and forded local creeks. I explored apartment complex construction sites on the weekends, when they were empty, climbing on the equipment, ascending giant piles of excavated dirt, and wandering through the half-built buildings. I dared myself into giant stormwater culverts, picking my way over puddles, looking at the pipes high on the walls spewing water, creeping further in and around the curves until the daylight of the opening dwindled to a terrifying darkness. And in all this, my family had no clear idea where I was or what I was doing, no way to track me or contact me. I was just gone, disappeared, until I miraculously reappeared safe and sound later in the day.
So yes, as I prepared to read and review The Air They Breathe, I worried that my childhood memories might leave me resistant to the idea I that the climate crisis presented a distinct danger to children above and beyond the crisis that faces each and every one of us..
Boy, was I wrong!
The book takes us through a number of climate change crises, from wildfire air pollution to heat waves to increasing disease vectors, but a running theme through all of these is that children are not simply small adults. As a pediatrician in Reno, Nevada (which, with an increase of 7.6 degrees in average daily temperature holds the distinction of being the fastest-warming city in the US), Hendrickson treats a lot of children with respiratory ailments caused by the smoke and ash that overtakes the city from the devastating wildfires that have plagued California and Nevada in recent years. She brings us close to the suffering of these children, the wheezing, coughing, struggling for breath. Asthma, which prior to 1960 was regarded by pediatrics as uncommon, tripled in American children between 1980 and 2010. Allergies and eczema have increased substantially as well. Incrreased heat and carbon dioxide in the air stimulate plant growth, which in turn stimulates pollen level, leading to increased hay fever and related illnesses. And while breathing oxygen is what allows us to live, ground-level ozone (oxygen with a third molecule attached) pollution is increasing, which irritates our lungs.
She offers data to connect the increased frequency and ferocity of wildfires to climate change. She offers the science behind the air pollution contained in those clouds of ash that periodically darken the city, including the microscopic ultrafine particles—“tiny fragments and droplets from trees, houses, cars, and whatever else has burned”—which are easily pulled deep into the lungs, passed on through the lining into the bloodstream, where they can wreak havoc on organs throughout the body. (This particle pollution is also a component of the everyday pollution caused by the burning of fossil fuels, but the wildfires create an acute crisis.)
And, yes, she makes clear how children are affected by this in ways that adults are not. We are born with between 20 and 50 million alvioli in our lungs---the tiny sacs at the end of the millions of branching pathways which transfer oxygen into our bloodstream. As adults, we have 300 to 500 million alvioli, a surface area inside our lungs equivalent to a racquetball court.
The amount of lung development that occurs after birth is one reason children are so vulnerable to environmental harm, and underscores how inseparable a child’s body is from the surrounding world. Every time Anna took a breath, the quality of the air she inhaled was literally shaping her lungs….Air pollutants damage lung tissue, and inhibit the dividing and multiplying of alvioli. They also appear to “turn off” genes that are important in the development of the respiratory tract. As a result, children exposed to chronic air pollution tend to have smaller lungs that move less air….
Lungs are one of the gateways through which bacteria, viruses, and fungi enter the body, so they have special immune cells to protect us from inhaled threats. But air pollutants, including those found in wildfire smoke, interfere with the development of lung immunity, leaving kids more susceptible to lung infections like bronchitis and pneumonia….
These impacts don’t just magically resolve when children turn eighteen. What happens in early childhood often affects our health for life. Children with impaired lung function tend to struggle with growth, learning and behavior….Injuries to young lungs can ripple through a lifetime, with a wave of costs not just to the individual, but to our health care system, economy, and society.
She points out how the damage can begin even before birth, as pollutants can pass through the placenta from mother to fetus, causing developmental problems and an increased possibility of premature birth. And there’s more issues specific to children: they breath faster, thus inhaling more. They play closer to the ground, where pollution can be worse. And their lung surface area, though smaller than that of an adult, is greater in proportion to their body size, so each breath has a greater effect on the body.
The chapter on increasing heat wave is largely set in my neck of the woods, Phoenix. I personally am a heat lover; when I walk out the door into a 115 degree day, my body blossoms with joyous exhilaration. Nevertheless, I know better than to do too much exertion in such heat, and to take it easy. Many of the anecdotes in this section are about hikers who need rescuing when they suffer from dehydration and heat stoke while hiking in the summer heat, up mountain trails with little shade and not carrying enough water. These stories are plentiful each year, and I do have a bit of trouble feeling sympathy for these idiots who don’t use common sense in the face of Mother Nature.
But even with those personal caveats, the chapter makes many powerful point about how society will struggle to cope with rising temperatures, as well as specific ways in which children’s developing bodies are more prone to danger and damage from extreme heat.
Two more chapters follow the same pattern One deals with mental health...the stress, anxiety and insecurity children when faced with the threat of disaster. They don’t have the lived experience and psychological toolkit yet in place to deal with destructive hurricanes, wildfires and other disasters. Another chapter deals with emerging diseases promoted by climate change, whether mosquito-borne infections like the Zika virus, or flourishing fungal diseases. Again, she details the specific ways in which children can be especially affected.
And throughout the book, she points out the decades of failure by the world to take fossil fuel pollution and climate change seriously. Society as a whole has failed our children by failing to work towards stabilizing the crisis. I thought about that common refrain on the left that anti-abortion right-wingers love to talk about protecting the unborn, but their politics also show a distinct lack of concern for children’s health, education and well-being after they are born. This book helped me expand that thought to the climate change denialism on the right: here too, they are demonstrating a complete disregard for the health of our children today and for the future they will have to live in.
The final chapter of the book focuses on our past failures, but also insists that it is still not too late:
It may seem strange that a pediatrician is talking about electricity, cars, farms, and garbage dumps. Doctors don’t typically give prescriptions for infrastructure and agriculture. But green energy and sustainable living as as important to my patients’ welfare as car seats, medications, laboratory tests, and vaccines. Again, children’s bodies and minds are inseparable from the atmosphere. Its health and theirs are linked. The toxins we dump upward, and the steps we take to end that practice, will hugely impact their lives….
But if you do despair, if you hear the lie that it is too late, too expensive, or too difficult to save your children from the worst; or that solar panels, wind turbines, and electric cars are as bad for the environment as fossil fuels’ or that people will freeze or starve if we give up those fuels, when in fact continuing to burn them threatens billions of lives—remember the hidden hand behind many of these stories. As Michael Mann detailed in The New Climate War, fossil fuel companies and their allies, including authoritarian petrostates such as Saudi Arabia and Russia, want us to feel hopeless, to give up and disengage. Through bots, trolls, and propaganda they push for our surrender to the fate they’ve chosen
. We must take the wheel from them and turn.
Two weeks until Election Day. Don’t forget my Blue Wave Special promotion: 20% off over 100 books on history, politics and current affairs, including dozens of choices for kids.
THIS WEEK’S NOTABLE NEW NONFICTION
- American Reckoning: Inside Trump’s Trial—and My Own, by Jonathan Alter. As one of a handful of journalists allowed in the courtroom, for 23 days Jonathan Alter sat just feet away from the most dangerous threat to democracy in American history, watching the spectacle of the century: the felony trial of Donald Trump. Highly publicized but untelevised and thus largely hidden from public view, this landmark trial offered hope of real justice amid a grueling eight-year national ordeal and foreshadowed the drama of the 2024 presidential election.
Alter shares everything he witnessed—from eviscerating takes on the colorful characters to the chilling legal ups and downs—to offer a barbed account of the trial and its aftermath, including fresh reporting about the historic events of the summer of 2024.
- Patriot: A Memoir, by Alexei Navalny. Alexei Navalny began writing Patriot shortly after his near-fatal poisoning in 2020. It is the full story of his life: his youth, his call to activism, his marriage and family, his commitment to challenging a world super-power determined to silence him, and his total conviction that change cannot be resisted—and will come.
In vivid, page-turning detail, including never-before-seen correspondence from prison, Navalny recounts, among other things, his political career, the many attempts on his life, and the lives of the people closest to him, and the relentless campaign he and his team waged against an increasingly dictatorial regime.
Written with the passion, wit, candor, and bravery for which he was justly acclaimed, Patriot is Navalny’s final letter to the world: a moving account of his last years spent in the most brutal prison on earth; a reminder of why the principles of individual freedom matter so deeply; and a rousing call to continue the work for which he sacrificed his life.
- Charging Forward: Lithium Valley, Electric Vehicles, and a Just Future, by Chris Benner and Manuel Pastor. California's Salton Sea region is home to some of the worst environmental health conditions in the country. It is also ground zero for a new "lithium gold rush"--a race to extract a mineral critical to the rapidly expanding electric vehicle and renewable energy storage markets. With enough lithium lurking beneath the surface to provide a third of global demand, who will benefit from the development of this precious resource?
A work of stunning analysis and reporting, Charging Forward shows that the questions raised by Lithium Valley lie at the heart of the "green transition." Weaving together movement politics, federal policy, and global supply chains, noted experts Chris Benner and Manuel Pastor stress that extracting lithium is just a first step: the real question is whether the region and the nation will address and overcome the environmental degradation, labor exploitation, and racial injustice that have been as much a part of the landscape as the Salton Sea itself.
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The Dark Path: The Structure of War and the Rise of the West, by Williamson Murray. In The Dark Path, Williamson Murray argues that the history of warfare in the West hinged on five revolutions, which both reflected the social, political, and economic conditions that produced them and in turn influenced how those conditions evolved. These five key turning points are the advent of the modern state, which formed bureaucracies and professional militaries; the Industrial Revolution, which produced the financial and industrial means to sustain and equip large armies; the French Revolution, which provided the ideological basis needed to sustain armies through continent-sized wars; the merging of the Industrial and French Revolutions in the U.S. Civil War; and the accelerating integration of technological advancement, financial capacity, ideology, and government that unleashed the modern capacity for total warfare. “Williamson Murray’s book demonstrates why military history should be a major part of any liberal arts curriculum, since he shows with extraordinary narrative detail why war has tragically been central to the story of humanity.”—Robert D. Kaplan, author of The Tragic Mind: Fear, Fate, and the Burden of Power
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The Living Medicine: How a Lifesaving Cure Was Nearly Lost—and Why It Will Rescue Us When Antibiotics Fail, by Lina Zeldovich. First discovered in 1917, bacteriophages—or “phages”—are living medicines: viruses that devour bacteria. Ubiquitous in the environment, they are found in water, soil, inside plants and animals, and in the human body.
When phages were first recognized as medicines, their promise seemed limitless. Grown by research scientists and physicians in France, the Soviet Union, and elsewhere to target specific bacteria, they cured cholera, dysentery, bubonic plague, and other deadly infectious diseases.
But after Stalin’s brutal purges and the rise of antibiotics, phage therapy declined and nearly was lost to history—until today. In The Living Medicine, acclaimed science journalist Lina Zeldovich reveals the remarkable history of phages, told through the lives of the French, Soviet, and American scientists who discovered, developed, and are reviving this unique cure for seemingly-intractable diseases. Ranging from Paris to Soviet Georgia to Egypt, India, Kenya, Siberia, and America, The Living Medicine shows how phages once saved tens of thousands of lives. Today, with our antibiotic shield collapsing, Zeldovich demonstrates how phages are making our food safe and, in cases of dire emergency, rescuing people from the brink of death. They may be humanity’s best defense against the pandemics to come.
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Bandit Heaven: The Hole-in-the-Wall Gangs and the Final Chapter of the Wild West, by Tom Clavin. Robbers Roost, Brown’s Hole, and Hole-in-the-Wall were three hideouts that collectively were known to outlaws as “Bandit Heaven.” During the 1880s and ‘90s these remote locations in Wyoming and Utah harbored hundreds of train and bank robbers, horse and cattle thieves, the occasional killer, and anyone else with a price on his head.
Clavin's Bandit Heaven is the entertaining story of these tumultuous times and the colorful characters who rode the Outlaw Trail through the frigid mountain passes and throat-parching deserts that connected the three hideouts—well-guarded enclaves no sensible lawman would enter. There are the “star” residents like gregarious Butch Cassidy and his mostly silent sidekick the Sundance Kid, and an array of fascinating supporting players like the cold-blooded Kid Curry, and “Black Jack” Ketchum (who had the dubious distinction of being decapitated during a hanging), among others.
Most of the hard-riding action takes place in the mid- to late-1890s when Bandit Heaven came to be one of the few safe places left as the law closed in on the dwindling number of active outlaws.
- How to Winter: Harness Your Mindset to Thrive on Cold, Dark, or Difficult Days, by Kari Leibowitz, PhD. Do you dread the end of Daylight Saving Time and grouch about the long, chilly season of gray skies and ice? Do you find yourself in a slump every January and February? What if there were a way to rethink this time of year? Kari Leibowitz moved above the Arctic Circle – where the sun doesn’t rise for two months each winter –expecting to research the season’s negative effects on mental health, only to find that inhabitants actually looked forward to it with delight and enthusiasm. Leibowitz has since travelled to places on earth with some of the coldest, darkest, longest and most intense winters, and discovered the power of “wintertime mindset”— viewing the season as full of opportunity and wonder. Impactful strategies for cultivating this wintertime mindset can teach us not just about braving the gray, cold months of the year, but also the darker and more difficult seasons of life.
- Daydreaming in the Solar System: Surfing Saturn's Rings, Golfing on the Moon, and Other Adventures in Space Exploration, by John E. Moores and Jesse Rogerson. Imagine traveling to the far reaches of the solar system, pausing for close-up encounters with distant planets, moons, asteroids, and comets, accompanied by a congenial guide to the science behind what you see. What, for instance, would it be like to fly in Titan’s hazy atmosphere? To walk across the surface of Mercury? To feel the rumble of a volcano brewing on one of Jupiter's largest moons? In Daydreaming in the Solar System, John Moores and Jesse Rogerson bring that dream to virtual life. Through a combination of story and science they let readers know what such an otherworldly experience would actually look, feel, and even taste like.
With data gathered over the decades by our robotic spacecraft, and with Michelle Parsons’s evocative illustrations, Moores and Rogerson boldly take you where no living being has gone before, along the way giving an engaging and accurate explanation of the science.
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Roman Year: A Memoir, by André Aciman. In Roman Year, André Aciman captures the period of his adolescence that began when he and his family first set foot in Rome, after being expelled from Egypt. Though Aciman’s family had been well-off in Alexandria, all vestiges of their status vanished when they fled, and the author, his younger brother, and his deaf mother moved into a rented apartment in Rome’s Via Clelia. Though dejected, Aciman’s mother and brother found their way into life in Rome, while Aciman, still unmoored, burrowed into his bedroom to read one book after the other. The world of novels eventually allowed him to open up to the city and, through them, discover the beating heart of the Eternal City.
Aciman’s time in Rome did not last long before he and his family moved across the ocean, but by the time they did, he was leaving behind a city he loved. In this memoir, the author, a genius of "the poetry of the place" (John Domini, The Boston Globe), conjures the sights, smells, tastes, and people of Rome as only he can.
- A Few Words in Defense of Our Country: The Biography of Randy Newman, by Robert Hilburn. Randy Newman is widely hailed as one of America’s all-time greatest songwriters, equally skilled in the sophisticated melodies and lyrics of the Gershwin-Porter era and the cultural commentary of his own generation, with Bob Dylan and Paul Simon among his most ardent admirers. While tens of millions around the world can hum “You’ve Got a Friend in Me,” his disarming centerpiece for Toy Story, most of them would be astonished to learn that the heart of Newman’s legacy is in the dozens of brilliant songs that detail the injustices, from racism to class inequality, that have contributed to the division of our nation. Rolling Stone declared that a single Newman song, “Sail Away,” tells us more about America than “The Star-Spangled Banner.” And yet, his legacy remains largely undocumented in book form—until now.
Veteran music journalist Hilburn has known Newman since his club debut at the Troubadour in 1970, and the two have maintained a connection in the decades since, conversing over the course of times good and bad. Though Newman has long refused to talk with potential biographers, he now gives Hilburn unprecedented access not only to himself but also to his archives, as well as his family, friends, and collaborators.
- We All Shine On: John, Yoko, and Me, by Elliot Mintz. In 1972, Elliot Mintz installed a red light in his bedroom in Laurel Canyon. When it started flashing, it meant that either John Lennon or Yoko Ono—or sometimes both—were calling him. Which they did almost every day for nearly ten years, engaging Mintz in hours-long late-night phone conversations that all but consumed him for the better part of a decade.
In We All Shine On, Mintz—a former radio and television host in Los Angeles—recounts the story of how their unlikely friendship began and where it led him over the years, revealing the ups and downs of a wild, touching, heartbreaking, and sometimes shocking relationship. Mintz takes readers inside John and Yoko’s inner sanctums, including their expansive seventh-floor apartment in New York’s fabled Dakota building, where Mintz was something of a semipermanent fixture, ultimately becoming the Lennons' closest and most trusted confidant. Mintz was with John and Yoko through creative highs, relationship and private challenges, fascinating interactions with the other former Beatles, and the happiest moment of their lives together, the birth of their son, Sean. He was also by Yoko’s side during the aftermath of John’s assassination on the doorstep of the Dakota—not merely a witness to it all, but a key figure in the drama of John and Yoko’s extraordinary lives.
- Brothers, by Alex van Halen. Brothers is seventy-year-old drummer Alex Van Halen’s love letter to his younger brother, Edward, (Maybe “Ed,” but never “Eddie”), written while still mourning his untimely death.
In his rough yet sweet voice, Alex recounts the brothers’ childhood, first in the Netherlands and then in working class Pasadena, California, with an itinerant musician father and a very proper Indonesian-born mother—the kind of mom who admonished her boys to “always wear a suit” no matter how famous they became—a woman who was both proud and practical, nonchalant about taking a doggie bag from a star-studded dinner. He also shares tales of musical politics, infighting, and plenty of bad-boy behavior. But mostly his is a story of brotherhood, music, and enduring love. "I was with him from day one,” Alex writes. “We shared the experience of coming to this country and figuring out how to fit in. We shared a record player, an 800 square foot house, a mom and dad, and a work ethic. Later, we shared the back of a tour bus, alcoholism, the experience of becoming successful, of becoming fathers and uncles, and of spending more hours in the studio than I’ve spent doing anything else in this life. We shared a depth of understanding that most people can only hope to achieve in a lifetime."
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