ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The human body is a complicated subject. And how that body ingests, processes, and draws energy from air, and how that air affects our brains, bones, blood, bladders, and everything else . . . well, I learned over the last few years that understanding—and writing about—all that is another beast altogether.

I am deeply indebted to the medical pulmonauts who offered me their time, wisdom, coaching, and repeated respiratory rectifications along this wild and weird journey. Thank you, Dr. Jayakar Nayak, at the Stanford University Otolaryngology Head & Neck Surgery Center for slipping away from a ten-hour brain surgery to jam endoscopes up my nose and then explain the subtleties of cilia and sphenoids and sebaceous glands over salads at Vino Enoteca. (And a big thanks to Nayak’s lab assistants, Nicole Borchard and Sachi Dholakia, for managing the mucosal madness.) Thank you, Dr. Marianna Evans, for schooling me in the ways of dysevolution and driving me all around Philly in such a nice car. Dr. Theodore Belfor and Dr. Scott Simonetti shared countless meals over countless months to describe the countless marvels of masticatory stress, nitric oxide, and Italian wines. Dr. Justin Feinstein at the Laureate Institute of Brain Research played hooky from his NIH lab work to give me a hard lesson in brain science, amygdalae, and the panicking power of carbon dioxide.

I begged and borrowed (with annotations, mind you) from several dozen elucidating books, interviews, and scientific articles penned by these respiratory renegades: Dr. Michael Gelb; Dr. Mark Burhenne; Dr. Steven Lin; Dr. Kevin Boyd; Dr. Ira Packman; Dr. John Feiner at the University of California, San Francisco Hypoxia Research Laboratory; Dr. Steven Park at the Department of Otorhinolaryngology, Albert Einstein College of Medicine; Dr. Amit Anand at the Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care, and Sleep Medicine at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center; Ann Kearney, doctor of speech-language pathology at the Stanford Voice and Swallowing Center; and, of course, the generous and garrulous Drs. John and Mike Mew.

A crew of DIY pulmonauts welcomed me into their lives and lungs and showed me the transformative applications of breathing for real people living in the real world. Thank you to Chuck McGee III at Iced Viking Breathworks; Lynn Martin at MDH Breathing Coordination; Sasha Yakovleva at The Breathing Center; Luis Sérgio Álvares DeRose, John Cosway Chisenhall, and Heduan Pinheiro at DeRose Method; Zach Fletcher at MindBodyClimb; and Tad Panther. Un grand merci to the mysterious and heretofore nameless clan of cataphiles for leading me deep below the Cimetière du Montparnasse and staining my jeans with thousand-year-old human bone dust. Thanks too to Mark Goettling at Bodimetrics for the suite of sleep and fitness monitoring devices and to Elizabeth Asch for offering up her luxurious Parisian pied-à-terre for an entire month.

Writing a paltry tack så jävla mycket feels like thin gratitude for my partner in nasal crime, Anders Olsson, a pulmonaut so dedicated to his craft that he ditched the glory of the Swedish midsommar to spend a month in dewy San Francisco with silicone up his nose, a pulse oximeter clipped to his finger, and tape on his lips. Thank you, Anders. But next time, can we just plug our ears instead?

My early attempts to leave no stone unturned in the lost art and science of breathing left me with a pile of word rubble. This is a long way of saying that this book, like most books, took a while and too often felt like Sisyphean drudgery.

Courtney Young, my virtuosic, adroit, and oft hilarious editor at Riverhead, boiled down a 270,000-word quagmire of sesquipedalian verbiage to the more digestible brick you now hold in your hands. Copilot/literary agent Danielle Svetcov at Levine Greenberg Rostan Literary Agency not only immediately returned my whiny calls—unheard-of in that line of work, trust me on this—but also worked side by side with me to sculpt, hone, and polish the verbs in her own ruthless and fabulous way. (Svetcov’s constant support is priceless, or, at minimum, worth way more than that 15 percent.) Alex Heard, once again, winced while he whittled and whetted innumerable chapter drafts, down to the “dagger quotes,” in almost legible cursive writing. (Sorry for ruining so many weekends, Alex.) Daniel Crewe at Penguin Books UK offered sage words of advice and encouragement early on and until the end.

I owe mafia-level favors to the readers who provided a much-needed editorial pummeling on early versions of this tome. Thank you to the crabby and scrupulous Adam Fisher; exclamatory Caroline Paul; poetic Matthew Zapruder; careful Michael Shryzpeck; adamant Richard Lowe; flexible Ron Penna; and cold-hearted Jason Dearen. Just give me a call whenever you need to move that body from the trunk.

My research assistant and fact-checker extraordinaire, Patrycja Przełucka, scoured through several hundred scientific papers with terrible titles like “The Correlation Between Erythropoiesis and Thrombopoiesis as an Index for Pre-Operative Autologous Blood Donation” and “Trained Breathing-Induced Oxygenation Acutely Reverses Cardiovascular Autonomic Dysfunction in Patients with Type 2 Diabetes and Renal Disease”—and then, then, she suffered the indignity of cross-checking this convolution, digit by digit, in the final drafts. Thank you, Patrycja, for your fastidiousness and spectacular grammar.

Lastly, firstly, to my lovely wife, Katie Storey, who breathes a constant supply of fresh, often-eucalyptus-scented air into my small office and frenzied life. Vi ĉiam spiras freŝan aeron, varma hundo.

Breath was written between the stacks of Weimar-era art books at the Mechanics’ Institute Library in San Francisco, at the American Library in Paris, and on the kitchen table of that little red-doored house beside the old Catholic cemetery in Volcano, California, population 103.