What an adventure this book is! There are those who love danger—the more extreme the better—and those whose idea of peril is taking the subway instead of an Uber. Both types will be enthralled by Mark Synnott’s book, an account of sailing the Northwest Passage in a boat of his own, a feat accomplished by only a few hundred. Synnott is a famed mountaineer, so his attraction to the sea came later in life. And it came in the shape of Camelot, a 32-foot ketch with two masts whose own misadventure introduced him to his future wife. He soon traded Camelot for the bigger Polar Sun, which he used to take him on a 7,000-mile voyage from Maine to Alaska via the Arctic Circle. No spoilers about the Northwest Passage here, but the fact that he is alive to write Into the Ice gives you a clue as to how it turned out.
Pause for a second, and now breathe. The air you just took in is the subject of the latest book by Carl Zimmer, one of our best and most engaging science writers. The air carries legions of microbes—some beneficial, some not—and Zimmer succeeds in vividly describing those who have studied the air around us, proving only as recently as the 1930s that germs could indeed be spread in the air and “could float for hours like smoke.” The coronavirus eventually taught us just how lethal that fact could be, but Air-Borne, though inspired by the pandemic, is about so much more than that scientifically humbling event. We change the air around us, and the air changes us, and there is no better examination of what that means for our species than Zimmer’s book.
Long before Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, there was John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev, and one can wish for no better guide to that Cold War relationship than Marvin Kalb, who was stationed in Moscow for CBS News during those years. His insights into Khrushchev are invaluable for those whose only dim memory of him is his debating Richard Nixon at a Moscow exhibition or promising to bury the West. The Soviet leader was more flexible and diplomatic than he was given credit for, and Kalb insists that if Kennedy had not been killed in 1963 and Khrushchev himself had not been ousted a year later, relations between the two countries might have flourished.
The book is enlivened by Kalb’s personal stories and the ups and downs of working for CBS, and the reader is left with a poignant sense of just how far Putin has pushed his country toward a “Mongol-rooted authoritarianism.” Let the record show that Kalb, ever the optimist, thinks that democratic rule is still possible.
Jim Kelly is the Books Editor at AIR MAIl. He can be reached at jkelly@airmail.news