Breath Taking

Wide-ranging in scope: a pre-prehistory of how we ended up with free oxygen in our atmosphere; leading to a prehistory of how animals evolved lungs; then a history of how/when we learned what we know about breathing and the lungs; and an overwhelming catalog of lung pathologies, including cases from the author's own practice. Side detours into comparative anatomy (bird lungs are really cool!), the politics of clean air, the greed of scummy tobacco companies and profit-driven big pharma. Enjoyable but in a detached sort of way: very easy to put down for a while. Informative in places but, having just finished it, I'm struggling to recall anything I really learned (except for bird lungs. Those are cool.)

Written before COVID, with three pages hastily added at publication time (around April 2020) so there's absolutely nothing useful or interesting about it. Too bad, but hey, it might mean a revised second edition in a few years.