Caesar's Last Breath
Decoding the Secrets of the Air Around Us
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Narrated by:
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Ben Sullivan
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By:
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Sam Kean
About this listen
The fascinating science and history of the air we breathe.
It's invisible. It's ever present. Without it, you would die in minutes. And it has an epic story to tell.
In Caesar's Last Breath, New York Times best-selling author Sam Kean takes us on a journey through the periodic table, around the globe, and across time to tell the story of the air we breathe, which, it turns out, is also the story of earth and our existence on it.
With every breath, you literally inhale the history of the world. On the Ides of March, 44 BC, Julius Caesar died of stab wounds on the Senate floor, 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 well 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.
Tracing the origins and ingredients of our atmosphere, Kean reveals how the alchemy of air reshaped our continents, steered human progress, powered revolutions, and continues to influence everything we do. Along the way we'll swim with radioactive pigs, witness the most important chemical reactions humans have discovered, and join the crowd at the Moulin Rouge for some of the crudest performance art of all time. Lively, witty, and filled with the astounding science of ordinary life, Caesar's Last Breath illuminates the science stories swirling around us every second.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio.
©2017 Sam Kean (P)2017 Hachette AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Since its formation nearly five billion years ago, our planet has been the sole living world in a vast and silent universe. Now, Earth's isolation is coming to an end. Over the past two decades, astronomers have discovered thousands of "exoplanets" orbiting other stars, including some that could be similar to our own world. Studying those distant planets for signs of life will be crucial to understanding life's intricate mysteries right here on Earth. In a firsthand account of this unfolding revolution, Lee Billings draws on interviews with top researchers.
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Bloated
- By Dr A on 01-09-14
By: Lee Billings
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Sun in a Bottle
- The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking
- By: Charles Seife
- Narrated by: Bill Weideman
- Length: 9 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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For the past 50 years, governments and research teams have tried to bottle the sun with lasers, magnets, sound waves, and particle beams, struggling to harness the power of fusion. Again and again, they have failed, disgracing generations of scientists. Throughout this fascinating journey, Charles Seife introduces us to the daring geniuses, villains, and victims of fusion science.
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Focused on the Lone Wolves
- By Robert Goldston on 11-14-08
By: Charles Seife
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What Einstein Didn't Know
- Scientific Answers to Everyday Questions
- By: Robert L. Wolke
- Narrated by: Sean Runnette
- Length: 8 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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How does soap know what's dirt? How do magnets work? Why do ice cubes crackle in your glass? And how can you keep them quiet? These are questions that torment us all. Now Robert L. Wolke, professor emeritus of chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh, provides definitive - and amazingly simple - explanations for the mysteries of everyday life.
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A funny thing happened on the way to a great book
- By Joseph on 10-01-12
By: Robert L. Wolke
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Chernobyl 01:23:40
- The Incredible True Story of the World's Worst Nuclear Disaster
- By: Andrew Leatherbarrow
- Narrated by: Michael Page
- Length: 6 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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At 01:23:40 on April 26th 1986, Alexander Akimov pressed the emergency shutdown button at Chernobyl's fourth nuclear reactor. It was an act that forced the permanent evacuation of a city, killed thousands, and crippled the Soviet Union. The event spawned decades of conflicting, exaggerated, and inaccurate stories.
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Lost in his own navel
- By Christopher on 10-17-16
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Energy
- A Human History
- By: Richard Rhodes
- Narrated by: Jacques Roy
- Length: 11 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Through an unforgettable cast of characters, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes explains how wood gave way to coal and coal made room for oil, as we now turn to natural gas, nuclear power, and renewable energy. Rhodes looks back on five centuries of progress, through such influential figures as Queen Elizabeth I, King James I, Benjamin Franklin, Herman Melville, John D. Rockefeller, and Henry Ford.
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No more accents, please!
- By Ned Gulley on 08-30-18
By: Richard Rhodes
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No Immediate Danger
- Carbon Ideologies, Volume One
- By: William T. Vollmann
- Narrated by: Sean Runnette
- Length: 16 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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In his nonfiction, William T. Vollmann has won acclaim as a singular voice tackling some of the most important issues of our age. Now, Vollmann turns to a topic that will define the generations to come - the factors and human actions that have led to global warming. Vollmann begins No Immediate Danger by examining and quantifying the many causes of climate change, from industrial manufacturing and agricultural practices to fossil fuel extraction, economic demand for electric power, and the justifiable yearning of people all over the world to live in comfort.
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Look at the brightside always and die in a dream!
- By Darwin8u on 04-14-19
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The Alchemy of Air
- A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler
- By: Thomas Hager
- Narrated by: Adam Verner
- Length: 10 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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At the dawn of the 20th century, humanity was facing global disaster. Mass starvation, long predicted for the fast-growing population, was about to become a reality. A call went out to the worlds scientists to find a solution. This is the story of the two enormously gifted, fatally flawed men who found it: the brilliant, self-important Fritz Haber and the reclusive, alcoholic Carl Bosch. Together they discovered a way to make bread out of air, built city-sized factories, controlled world markets, and saved millions of lives.
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Great Book Thoroughly Researched
- By Terry A. Gray on 10-21-11
By: Thomas Hager
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Ignition!
- An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants
- By: John Drury Clark, Isaac Asimov - foreward
- Narrated by: Jonathan Todd Ross
- Length: 9 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Ignition! is the story of the search for a rocket propellant which could be trusted to take man into space. This search was a hazardous enterprise carried out by rival labs who worked against the known laws of nature, with no guarantee of success or safety. John Drury Clark writes with irreverent and eyewitness immediacy about the development of the explosive fuels strong enough to negate the relentless restraints of gravity. The resulting volume is as much a memoir as a work of history, sharing a behind-the-scenes view of an enterprise that eventually took men to the moon.
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Science man lists names of chemicals for 9 hours
- By Adrian on 05-06-19
By: John Drury Clark, and others
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Space Chronicles
- Facing the Ultimate Frontier
- By: Neil deGrasse Tyson
- Narrated by: Mirron Willis
- Length: 10 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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With his signature wit and thought-provoking insights, Neil deGrasse Tyson - one of our foremost thinkers on all things space - illuminates the past, present, and future of space exploration and brilliantly reminds us why NASA matters now as much as ever. As Tyson reveals, exploring the space frontier can profoundly enrich many aspects of our daily lives, from education systems and the economy to national security and morale.
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The least helpful review of Space Chronicles.
- By Joshua Kring on 06-17-15
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The Making of the Atomic Bomb
- 25th Anniversary Edition
- By: Richard Rhodes
- Narrated by: Holter Graham
- Length: 37 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Here for the first time, in rich human, political, and scientific detail, is the complete story of how the bomb was developed, from the turn-of-the-century discovery of the vast energy locked inside the atom to the dropping of the first bombs on Japan. Few great discoveries have evolved so swiftly - or have been so misunderstood. From the theoretical discussions of nuclear energy to the bright glare of Trinity, there was a span of hardly more than 25 years.
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Beware limitations of the reader
- By JFanson on 01-01-19
By: Richard Rhodes
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Periodic Tales
- A Cultural History of the Elements, From Arsenic to Zinc
- By: Hugh Aldersey-Williams
- Narrated by: Antony Ferguson
- Length: 12 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Like the alphabet, the calendar, or the zodiac, the periodic table of the chemical elements has a permanent place in our imagination. But aside from the handful of common ones (iron, carbon, copper, gold), the elements themselves remain wrapped in mystery. We do not know what most of them look like, how they exist in nature, how they got their names, or of what use they are to us.
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Interesting but Rambling
- By Carolyn on 08-24-15
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A Little History of the World
- By: E. H. Gombrich
- Narrated by: Ralph Cosham
- Length: 9 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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E. H. Gombrich's world history, an international best seller now available in English for the first time, is a text dominated not by dates and facts but by the sweep of experience across the centuries, a guide to humanity's achievements, and an acute witness to its frailties.
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an enlightening book; very well read
- By A.B.Oxford on 06-03-06
By: E. H. Gombrich
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When Humans Nearly Vanished
- The Catastrophic Explosion of the Toba Volcano
- By: Donald R. Prothero
- Narrated by: Qarie Marshall
- Length: 6 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Some 73,000 years ago, the Mount Toba supervolcano in toda's Indonesia erupted, releasing the energy of a million tons of explosives. So much ash and debris was injected into the stratosphere that it partially blocked the sun's radiation and caused global temperatures to drop for a decade. In this book, Donald R. Prothero presents the controversial argument that the Toba catastrophe nearly wiped out the human race, leaving only about a thousand to ten thousand breeding pairs of humans worldwide.
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A very special book
- By Scott Fitzsimmons on 02-02-19
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Uranium
- War, Energy, and the Rock That Shaped the World
- By: Tom Zoellner
- Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
- Length: 12 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Uranium is a common element in the earth's crust and the only naturally occurring mineral with the power to end all life on the planet. After World War II, it reshaped the global order---whoever could master uranium could master the world. Marie Curie gave us hope that uranium would be a miracle panacea, but the Manhattan Project gave us reason to believe that civilization would end with apocalypse.
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GREAT book, awful narration
- By Carolyn on 03-30-09
By: Tom Zoellner
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What listeners say about Caesar's Last Breath
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Ram Ramabhadran
- 05-10-18
Superb book all round!!!
The main title of the book is misleading as to what is contained in the book; this prevented me from listening to it sooner. This is a superb book! Sam Kean is an excellent writer who makes complex scientific ideas very simple both for professional scientists like me and for the public. The scientific facts are interlaced with stories of the discoverers and very many interesting scientific anecdotes. The humour is terrific even for a serious, typically terse scientific subject.
Ben Sullivan's narration elevates Kean's writing to another level--perfect tone and speed.
All in all, I enjoyed this book very much and look forward to reading other books by Kean.
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- RJWhite
- 08-15-18
Worth a listen
I found the whole book quite interesting, but disjointed. Being a science geek, all the interesting facts in the book were sufficient to help me ignore the lack of a core theme to the whole project. It wasn't really about "all the air around us" all the way through the book, but I found it quite good nonetheless!
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- Jana L Horner
- 07-18-18
Excellent
The writer did an amazing amount of research to put together this engaging book. If you are interested in science, this book is an excellent choice. It is not just a listing of cold scientific facts and important breakthroughs. It also includes interesting and sometimes hilarious tangents related to the subject. The performer also does a great job moving the story along and matching his tone to the writer's. It is altogether enjoyable.
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- Jason
- 09-04-21
Great Book
Very scientific, historical, and informative. 10/10
the rest of this is to make the
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- Abishek
- 06-09-20
Great listen
Another Sam Kean’s masterfully written book. Great narration and a fun listen. There are some stories that are just fun listening to again and again.
It’s great even if you are not in sciences but are just interested about things around you!
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- Ken
- 10-24-19
Great Stories on the be Air We Breathe
Sam Lean never fails to surprise and entertain me with intriguing stories that I could have overlooked.
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- sdp
- 08-11-17
vastly entertaining
Sam makes science fun and accessible via great story telling. You won't regret reading any of his books. They all entertain and inform.
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42 people found this helpful
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- Sami
- 08-06-18
Science + Entertainment = Education the fun way
Not being that interested in the Sciences, I was amazed to find that, with Sam Kean's excellent naration, and the facinating stories in Caesar's Last Breath, I was totally absorbed, and left to wonder what took me so long to discover the extraordinary role gasses play in our daily lives. I would highly recommend this book to anyone with a sense of humor and a grain of curiosity about how we, and the world around us, function..
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- OpenMindedNotCredulous
- 02-21-18
Listen even if you hate science and math
Whether you love science and math or those subjects stress you out you'll love this book. Whichever group you are in this is a book that you'll probably want to listen to more than once. You'll probably learn something new each time your read (or listen) to it.
It reminded me a little bit of James Burkes "Connections" TV series. The author does a great job of making the science understandable to everyone. Most notably by using examples and analogies that most people can identify with. And like "Connections" it explains how each discovery made another discovery or invention possible. Usually in ways that could not have been predicted.
What little math is present is mostly of the form "you inhaled three trillion atoms of nitrogen". So if you have even a vague idea what terms like "trillion" and "million" mean you'll be fine. It tells absolutely fascinating stories about how we've come to know so much about the air around us. Not to mention how that knowledge has improved our lives.
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Story
- Jonatas Sampaio Carvalho De Carlos
- 03-20-19
I loved this book!
This book makes you travel through the world of gases and the history of each one that is, somehow, relatated to human life and evolution. But different from others, the autor guides our travel with passion for science, willing to transmit knowledge and, Le P tomane, a lot of sense of humor. Seriously, there is a chapter about every gas important to us and the history behind them! Highly recommended!
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