James Nestor

BIBLIOGRAPHIC DETAILS:
(Available in Print: COPYRIGHT: 5/26/2022; PUBLISHER: Riverhead Books; ISBN: 978-0735213616; PAGES: 304; Unabridged.)
(Available as Digital)
*This edition-Audio: COPYRIGHT: 5/26/2020; ISBN: 9780593211526; PUBLISHER: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing; DURATION: 07:22:49; PARTS: 7; Unabridged; FILE SIZE: 210662 KB
Film or tv: I don’t think so.

SERIES:
No

MAJOR CHARACTERS:
N/A

SUMMARY/ EVALUATION:
How I picked it: My husband purchased the hardbound version of this book. I picked it up one day and read the first few pages, not really expecting to get interested, but I did. So, I searched for the audio version with my LAPL access to Overdrive.
This book inspires one to breath correctly and explains that proper (i.e., healthy) breathing isn’t just about breathing deep, but also about breathing slow, and through one’s nose rather than through one’s mouth—even when sleeping. It stresses the importance of these things and discusses various experiments and studies on the subject of breathing. At the end, there are breathing exercises, which make the audio format better because one can follow along with the demonstration and thereby get the timing right.
Because my husband wants to hear this one as well, and I want to continue the exercises, I intend to actually purchase this one from Audible.

AUTHOR:
James Nestor: “James Nestor is an author and journalist who has written for Outside, Scientific American, Dwell, National Public Radio, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Men's Journal, the San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, and others.[1] His 2020 nonfiction book, Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, was an international bestseller, debuting on the Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times bestseller lists and spending 18 weeks on the New York Times Best Sellers in its first year of release. Breath won the award for Best General Nonfiction Book of 2020 by the American Society of Journalists and Authors[2] and was a finalist for the Royal Society Science Book Prize.[3] Breath will be translated into more than 35 languages[4] in 2022.” __Wikipedia

NARRATOR:
James Nestor: (See above.)

GENRE:
Non-fiction; Health & Fitness; Science; Sports & Recreations

LOCATIONS:
N/A

TIME FRAME:
N/A

SUBJECTS:
Proper breathing

DEDICATION:
"To K.S."

SAMPLE QUOTATION:
From “Introduction”
"The place looked like something out of Amityville: all paint-chipped walls, dusty windows, and menacing shadows cast by moonlight. I walked through a gate, up a flight of creaking steps, and knocked on the door.
When it swung open, a woman in her 30s with woolly eyebrows and oversize white teeth welcomed me inside. She asked me to take off my shoes, then led me to a cavernous living room, its ceiling painted sky blue with wispy clouds. I took a seat beside a window that rattled in the breeze and watched through jaundiced streetlight as others walked in. A guy with prisoner eyes. A stern-faced man with Jerry Lewis bangs. A blond woman with an off-center bindi on her forehead. Through the rustle of shuffling feet and whispered hellos, a truck rumbled down the street blasting “Paper Planes,” the inescapable anthem of the day. I removed my belt, loosened the top button on my jeans, and settled in.
I’d come here on the recommendation of my doctor, who’d told me, “A breathing class could help.” It could help strengthen my failing lungs, calm my frazzled mind, maybe give me perspective.
For the past few months, I’d been going through a rough patch. My job was stressing me out and my 130-year-old house was falling apart. I’d just recovered from pneumonia, which I’d also had the year before and the year before that. I was spending most of my time at home wheezing, working, and eating three meals a day out of the same bowl while hunched over week-old newspapers on the couch. I was in a rut—physically, mentally, and otherwise. After a few months of living this way, I took my doctor’s advice and signed up for an introductory course in breathing to learn a technique called Sudarshan Kriya.
At 7:00 p.m., the bushy-browed woman locked the front door, sat in the middle of the group, inserted a cassette tape into a beat-up boom box, and pressed play. She told us to close our eyes. Through hissing static, the voice of a man with an Indian accent flowed from the speakers. It was squeaky, lilting, and too melodious to sound natural, as if it had been taken from a cartoon. The voice instructed us to inhale slowly through our noses, then to exhale slowly. To focus on our breath.
We repeated this process for a few minutes. I reached over to a pile of blankets and wrapped one around my legs to keep my stocking feet warm beneath the drafty window. I kept breathing but nothing happened. No calmness swept over me; no tension released from my tight muscles. Nothing.
Ten, maybe 20 minutes passed. I started getting annoyed and a bit resentful that I’d chosen to spend my evening inhaling dusty air on the floor of an old Victorian. I opened my eyes and looked around. Everyone had the same somber, bored look. Prisoner Eyes appeared to be sleeping. Jerry Lewis looked like he was relieving himself. Bindi sat frozen with a Cheshire Cat smile on her face. I thought about getting up and leaving, but I didn’t want to be rude. The session was free; the instructor wasn’t paid to be here. I needed to respect her charity. So I closed my eyes again, wrapped the blanket a little tighter, and kept breathing.
Then something happened. I wasn’t conscious of any transformation taking place. I never felt myself relax or the swarm of nagging thoughts leave my head. But it was as if I’d been taken from one place and deposited somewhere else. It happened in an instant.
The tape came to an end and I opened my eyes. There was something wet on my head. I lifted my hand to wipe it off and noticed my hair was sopping. I ran my hand down my face, felt the sting of sweat in my eyes, and tasted salt. I looked down at my torso and noticed sweat blotches on my sweater and jeans. The temperature in the room was about 68 degrees—much cooler beneath the drafty window. Everyone had been covered in jackets and hoodies to keep warm. But I had somehow sweated through my clothes as if I’d just run a marathon.
The instructor approached and asked if I was OK, if I’d been sick or had a fever. I told her I felt perfectly fine. Then she said something about the body’s heat, and how each inhaled breath provides us with new energy and each exhale releases old, stale energy. I tried to take it in but was having trouble focusing. I was preoccupied with how I was going to ride my bike three miles home from the Haight-Ashbury in sweat-soaked clothes."

RATING:
5 stars.

STARTED READING – FINISHED READING
5-21-2022 to 5-31-2022… (more)

This book feels very much like a late night infomercial, that it’s trying to sell you something. And it is, in a way, just not something you really have to pay for.

Many of the claims seem outlandish, bordering on ridiculous. Breathing can cure emphysema, make you hot when it’s cold, make you cool when it’s sweltering, make you not need to eat or drink for long periods.

Additionally, the information seems disjointed; is it oxygen or carbon dioxide that’s most important? This book seems to think both depending on where in the story you are. Bone structure of animals seems to change drastically in a matter of months, which feels a little odd.

All that said, breathing is one of the most important things we as living creatures do, so learning about it is important, and if nothing else, this book has made me consider more how I’m breathing, which is almost certainly a good thing.… (more)