Air-Borne

The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe

By: Carl Zimmer

Narrated by: Joe Ochman

The fascinating, untold story of the air we breathe, the hidden life it contains, and invisible dangers that can turn the world upside down

Every day we draw in two thousand gallons of air—and thousands of living things. From the ground to the stratosphere, the air teems with invisible life. This last great biological frontier remains so mysterious that it took over two years for scientists to finally agree that the COVID pandemic was caused by an airborne virus.

In Air-Borne, award-winning New York Times columnist and author Carl Zimmer leads us on an odyssey through the living atmosphere and through the history of its discovery. We travel to the tops of mountain glaciers, where Louis Pasteur caught germs from the air, and follow Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh above the clouds, where they conducted groundbreaking experiments. We meet the long-forgotten pioneers of aerobiology including William and Mildred Wells, who tried for decades to warn the world about airborne infections, only to die in obscurity.

Air-Borne chronicles the dark side of aerobiology with gripping accounts of how the United States and the Soviet Union clandestinely built arsenals of airborne biological weapons designed to spread anthrax, smallpox, and an array of other pathogens. Air-Borne also leaves listeners looking at the world with new eyes—as a place where the oceans and forests loft trillions of cells into the air, where microbes eat clouds, and where life soars thousands of miles on the wind.

Weaving together gripping history with the latest reporting on COVID and other threats to global health, Air-Borne surprises us as it reveals the hidden world of the air.

©2025 Carl Zimmer (P)2025 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

"What is in the air we breathe? That is the question Zimmer, an award-winning New York Times science writer, sets out to answer in this brisk, lyrical tour of aerobiology — from germ warfare and the identification of airborne viruses to the proliferation of Covid and lifesaving discoveries that lend color and shape to the invisible." —The New York Times

"Another brilliant work from one of the very best science writers, Air-Borne will leave you agog at the incredible world that floats unseen around us, and outraged at the forces that stopped us from appreciating that world until, for many people, it was too late. It is a book about how much there is still left to know, and how frustrating it can be to turn knowledge into wisdom." —Ed Yong, New York Times bestselling author of An Immense World

“With exhaustive detail and impressive breadth, Zimmer chronicles the multigenerational comeback of a nearly lost science.” —Scientific American