MDPAC Book Club - Breath by James Nestor

April 20, 2023, 7:00 - 8:00 PM

Join us for a facilitated discussion via Zoom of James Nestor's 2020 book "Breath"

To ensure meaningful discussion, we recommend that you read at least half of the book.

Breath explores how the human species has lost the ability to breathe properly over the past several hundred thousand years and is now suffering from a laundry list of maladies — snoring, sleep apnea, asthma, autoimmune disease — because of it. Nestor travels the world to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it. The answers aren’t found in pulmonology labs, as we might expect, but in the muddy digs of ancient burial sites, secret Soviet facilities, New Jersey choir schools, and the smoggy streets of Sao Paulo.

Drawing on thousands of years of medical texts and recent cutting-edge studies in pulmonology, psychology, biochemistry, and human physiology, Breath turns the conventional wisdom of what we thought we knew about our most basic biological function on its head.

Hardcover, 304 pages
Published Riverhead Books (May 26 2020)