An Ocean of Air is a scientific book, but it certainly does not feel like it. This book is an interesting, fun, and mostly light, read. It's not just the near total absence of scientific formulas and jargon that makes the book so readable. Don't be fooled. This is not dumbed-down science. What does the trick is Walker's use of narrative, her storytelling. An Ocean of Air reads like an anthology of short, interconnected stories that just happen to have a unifying scientific theme. She tells the story of air by stringing together short biographical tales of the many natural philosophers, as scientists were formerly called, whose discoveries and life's work have shed light on the mysteries of air. These stories are like a scientific relay race in which material is added into the baton by each runner, and we, the current holders of the baton, have not only benefited from the accumulated knowledge contained therein, but continue to add to it.

As Simon Singh from The Daily Telegraph writes on the dust jacket, "[t]he scientists are almost as interesting as their science." They are indeed.  After Kittinger, we learn about Galileo Galilei, the man who is said to have muttered after his famous forced recantation, "Eppur si muove!" ("And yet it moves!"), yet could not bring himself to believe that the atmosphere itself was heavy. Then there is Evangelista Torricelli, the young man who worked with Galileo in his final three months, who proved that vacuum doesn't suck, but rather that air pushes. It is from Torricelli that Walker borrows the title of her book, for he wrote that "We live submerged at the bottom of an ocean of air."

There are so many memorable characters in this book. Allowing us to get to know each person a little, to get a little glimpse of the individual, not just the scientific discovery attached to the name, makes the science easy to read. That and the fact that the language is straight-forward, though not plain, and omits much of the highly technical stuff behind the science. Most of us have likely heard of a great many of the scientists, mostly men by virtue of the times, and have learned some of the things they discovered. But knowing a little more about the people brings the stories closer and aids memory. The overall intent of the book, so it seems to me, is not to pass on minute scientific details, but rather to impress on her readers the larger picture of the wonder that is the air, as also its importance to life as we know it.