Author: Jennifer Graham

Breath, The New Science of a Lost Art, by James Nestor (Riverhead, 304 pages)

The pandemic has forced publishers to delay the release of dozens of books that didn’t seem appropriate to bring to market as a potentially deadly respiratory disease was spreading.

No such problem for Breath, journalist James Nestor’s examination of how generations of us became mouth-breathers, and how the practice is ruining our looks and our health. You with the sleep apnea. Me with the perpetually clogged sinuses. Nestor bids us to breathe only through our nose, “the gatekeeper of our bodies, pharmacist to our minds and weather vanes to our emotions,” and to adopt a pace of inhaling and exhaling that comprises what he calls “the perfect breath.”

There’s a formula that seems to show God likes math: Inhale 5.5 seconds, exhale 5.5 seconds equals 5.5 breaths a minute, for a total consumption of about 5.5 liters of air.

Some years ago, Nestor became interested in a subset of extreme athletes called freedivers, people who can hold their breath for more than five minutes and dive deep in the ocean without breathing equipment. His exploration of that culture led to 2014’s Deep, Freediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells Us About Ourselves. He also took a class in mindful breathing that, while boring at the time, resulted in more focus and calm the next day.

So he began studying super-breathers, people who believe that how we breathe is intimately connected to how healthy we are, and noticing the differences between them and ordinary people who can hold their breath for maybe 20 seconds without thinking they’re going to explode.

And he concluded that most of us don’t really know how to breathe, even though we do it 50,000 times a day. We breathe sloppily, through whatever orifice happens to be open at the time. We take short, shallow breaths, many more times a minute than necessary. We can breathe like this, but we’re not meant to, Nestor argues. And the combination of a soft, modern diet that doesn’t require energetic chewing, and poor breathing habits, is rearranging our skulls, not for the better, he says.

This is not a new idea. In 1862, an artist named George Catlin traveled through reservations of native Americans and documented their remarkable good health and straight teeth, which in his book The Breath of Life he attributed to breathing only through the nose. The native Americans, like other civilizations 1,000 years before Christ, were convinced that mouth breathing led to ill health. Mothers would watch their sleeping babies and gently pinch their mouths closed if they opened, so children would grow into adults who only breathed through their noses.

If this seems weird, you should know that there live among us modern humans who put a piece of tape on their mouths before going to bed at night, to achieve the same goal. For a while, Nestor was among them.

As part of his research, he became half of a two-subject study to monitor the effects of spending 10 days breathing only through his mouth, and then 10 days breathing only through his nose.

Nestor emerged from his experiment convinced that the ancients were right, that we sacrifice much of our health and vitality by ignoring the quiet, constant intake of air, which we take for granted until our capacity becomes diminished. Research has shown that we absorb 18 percent more oxygen when we breathe through our nose than through our mouth. Air taken in through the nostrils is substantively different from air processed through the mouth.

Believers include a Silicon Valley dentist who tells his patients that chronic mouth breathing causes periodontal disease, cavities and bad breath and suggests that they use “sleep tape” on their mouth at night to break the habit, and a woman convinced that breathing therapy can heal scoliosis, among other conditions.

The modern tendency to breathe with both the nose and the mouth has effects beyond our perpetually clogged noses. Our nasal cavity atrophies when it’s not robustly used, and even our lungs suffer when we’re not using them to their potential; they further deteriorate with age. But, according to Nestor, and the Tibetians, “The internal organs are malleable, and we can change them at nearly any time.” Exercise helps, and so does proper breathing, which can also decrease anxiety and improve sleep, among myriad other improvements, Nestor promises. It did for him, although he warns that there is no breathing exercise that can dissolve an embolism or heal cancer. In short, better breathing can improve your life, but not save it.

“The glories of nasal breathing” is not the sexiest topic, but Nestor is persuasive and his narrative sings, at least for the first hundred or so pages. Later, he drills down into techniques he calls Breathing+, which he admits is a sort of “respiratory gauntlet” and not nearly as appealing as shutting your mouth and counting to 5½.

But in a culture where some of us are so perpetually stressed and distracted that we forget to breathe for a half-minute — a phenomenon known as “email apnea” — we could use a breathing coach. Breath suggests that we should all shut our mouth, but for eating and brushing our teeth. B+

BOOK NOTES
For a couple of pleasant hours during the last week of May, it looked like the nation was going to turn its eyes to … birdwatching.
Before rage over the death of George Floyd exploded nationwide, rage over Amy Cooper’s tirade against birdwatcher Christian Cooper in Central Park had spun off a delightful Twitter diversion, #Blackbirdersweek.
The virtual celebration was begun by a Georgia grad student, Corina Newsome, who studies seaside sparrows. It was quickly eclipsed by other, more momentous events, but in times of trauma there seems something healing in putting down the phone and picking up the binoculars. And there are a couple of new books out to assist.
Celebrated nature writer Jennifer Ackerman’s The Bird Way is an examination of how birds “talk, work, play, parent and think” (Penguin, 368 pages). And Massachusetts naturalist David Allen Sibley has a new guide called What It’s Like to Be a Bird (Knopf, 240 pages). And Todd Telander has written a new Falcon Pocket Guide called Birds of New England (Falcon Guides, 192 pages).
Useful as they are, none of these are selling as well as the new Hunger Games prequel, Suzanne Collins’ The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.
Meanwhile, it’s not as useful as a $1,200 stimulus check, but Publishers Weekly, the venerable trade magazine about books and publishing, recently made its digital edition available for free to anyone who signs up on its website. It’s not clear how long this will last; the website says “free during the Covid-19 crisis.” But there’s an extraordinary amount of content that is usually behind a paywall, including current and past bestseller lists and a database of reviews going back to 1895. Not bad in exchange for an email address.
Another pandemic freebie is available from Audible, which has made a collection of children’s stories free “as long as school is on pause.” Go to stories.audible.com.

By Wendy Williams (Simon & Schuster, 240 pages)

The next time you think one of your relatives is weird, breathe deeply and think of Miriam Rothschild. Her father collected fleas.

“A flea lover since childhood,” he amassed more than 260,000 of them, writes Wendy Williams in The Language of Butterflies, explaining how Miriam Rothschild, a self-educated scientist and butterfly enthusiast, came naturally to the study of entomology.

Or consider Herman Strecker, a 19th-century stone carver who collected 50,000 butterflies. “He had a long face and a long neck and an even longer, out-of-control beard. He looked like Moses. He had deep-sunken grief-filled eyes. He lived the unkempt life of a zealot, going so far as to crawl in between his bedsheets with his pants and boots on,” Williams writes.

These unusual men, however, are peripheral characters in the story of butterflies, which Williams, a New England science writer, tells with aplomb. You may not care about butterflies. Don’t let that keep you from this book, which is more interesting than anything you will see on TV this week.

Even the most butterfly-illiterate people are vaguely aware of the monarch butterfly’s astonishing migration from Canada to Mexico, which Williams explains compellingly, having witnessed their arrival on a mountaintop, an experience that she calls “otherworldly.”

“The migration of the monarchs from points as far north as Canada all the way south to these particular mountaintops is a world phenomenon that belongs to everyone on the planet,” she writes. “It’s a source of global joy, like the migration of the wildebeest on the Serengeti Plain or the migration of gray whales off the west coast of North America.

“They are all following the sun, just as we would if we could.”

The monarch is the most famous of butterflies, and the most brutal — the males rape the females. You’d think they wouldn’t have the physiology for violence, but butterflies, Williams writes, are surprisingly sturdy. They look fragile yet have “robust” exoskeletons built for endurance.

But when it comes to interesting life stories, the monarchs have serious competition from a butterfly variety called Fender’s blue, which pupates underground, cared for by ants. When the butterfly emerges, the ants carry it to freedom above ground, as if the insect’s triumph is their own.

It’s an almost unbelievable story of a symbiotic relationship between creatures that we scarcely notice exist. The ants are motivated by the “invisible hand” described by 18th-century economist Adam Smith. Their reward is the sweet fluid that the caterpillar secretes, the ant equivalent of candy; in exchange for the treat, the ants provide protection from predators that the butterfly-to-be needs.

But it’s not the strange circumstances of butterfly existence that cause humans to be fascinated by them, Williams says. It’s their colors. “Your brain processes color information much, much more quickly than the information about movement. … What that means is that the color of an apple — or, in a spillover effect, the color of a butterfly — hits us fast and hard, in the gut.”

As flying insects with scales on their wings, moths and butterflies are cut from the same cloth, so to speak. Both belong to the second-largest category of insects, lepidoptera. But the drab moth repels us while the colorful butterfly entrances. Williams believes butterflies satisfy an innate craving for color in the human brain. In her 60s she set out to discover why the insect inspires biologists, hoarders and thieves — yes, there is a “international underground Lepidoptera market,” in case you were wondering.

The Language of Butterflies equally entrances, thanks to its author. This is not the Wendy Williams, radio host and lifestyle columnist, whose titles include Is the Bitch Dead or What? but the Wendy Williams who wrote a thoughtful history of the horse and is the co-author of 2007’s Cape Wind, a sympathetic examination of wind farming proposed off Cape Cod. Her voice is engaging and friendly; her enthusiasm for exploration, infectious. (This is a woman who keeps in her car a wide variety of footwear — hiking boots, riding boots, water shoes and so forth — just in case.)

Unlike wind farming, the subject of butterflies, approached deftly, can be apolitical. Williams worries about climate change and its effect on butterflies, wondering if one day their migration might be the stuff of lore, like the migration of passenger pigeons and North American bison. But she is neither a scold nor a Cassandra, and her tone is ebullient and hopeful. The only question she doesn’t answer adequately is what, exactly, one does with the corpses of 260,000 fleas. A

BOOK NOTES
Recent events in Minnesota and New York City’s Central Park invite a reflection on the experience of being black in America. For people who haven’t had that experience, there are books.
A fine place to start is A Particular Kind of Black Man, which we reviewed here last year. (Simon & Schuster hardcover, paperback coming in August.) It’s a novel, but Tope Folarin draws on his experiences as a Nigerian-American growing up in Utah to craft a deeply moving, and sometimes painful, story.
In the opening pages the protagonist remembers an experience from his childhood: An elderly woman would sometimes appear by his side while he walked to school, often patting his head affectionately. One day she said to him sweetly, “If you’re a good boy here on earth, you can serve me in heaven.”
The child was just 5 and saw the promise as generous and magical, not the punch in the gut that it is to the reader. Folarin has said this exchange happened to him. This wasn’t 100 years ago. Folarin is 38.
On Twitter, some readers are asking for advice on books that can help them better understand the American-American experience. One title that keeps coming up is The New Jim Crow, Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Michelle Alexander’s book came out in 2010, but a 10th-anniversary paperback edition was released in January by The New Press.
Also new in paperback is Mitchell S. Jackson’s Survival Math, an acclaimed memoir of growing up black in predominantly white Oregon. The prologue is a poignant letter to the first of the family to come from Cape Verde to America, in the 1700s. “This ain’t our Eden,” it concludes.
Two years old but No. 1 on Amazon for a while last week is Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism (Beacon Press). “I have never met a white person without an opinion on racism,” she writes. “… And white people’s opinions on racism tend to be strong. Yet race relations are profoundly complex. We must be willing to consider that unless we have devoted intentional and ongoing study, our opinions are necessarily uninformed, even ignorant.”
Also suddenly a bestseller is 2019’s How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi, and another title co-written by Kendi, Stamped, Racism, Anti Racism, and You, co-author Jason Reynolds (Little, Brown).
To America’s credit, many of these titles are now on backorder. There will be more.