Review by Choice Review
People divide the world ocean into smaller bodies of water, an extreme example being the Southern Ocean, a globe-circling space torn out of the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic oceans. But historians have been attracted to the notion of studying influential bodies of water even though such delineations can be quite arbitrary. Weaving his own widespread travels into an episodic historical narrative, the prolific and popular Winchester offers a rollicking "biography of the Atlantic." The subtitle aptly conveys the discursive contents of the text. Richly descriptive, breezy, and vigorous, Winchester's prose abounds with sharp images, and the richness of his vocabulary caused this reader to reach for his dictionary for words like "epibenthic," "pelmet," and "ablating." Curiously, although Winchester argues persuasively for the importance of the Atlantic world as wielder of power and shaper of global civilization, he fails to muse upon or even mention the great shift of economic productivity and influence from the Atlantic to the Pacific that has been such a major phenomenon of the contemporary world. Ultimately, will scholars agree with Winchester's claim that the Atlantic was "the grandest ocean on the planet"? Summing Up: Recommended. General collections/public libraries. J. C. Perry Tufts University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
SIMON WINCHESTER'S books are often driven by dramatic events: homicide, eruption, earthquake. They're thriller-histories, and he does them brilliantly. He made his name with "The Professor and the Madman," a gripping account about murder, insanity and the making of the Oxford English Dictionary. His subsequent output revealed a taste for big Earthy subjects. "The Map That Changed the World" spun the history of geology into a popular beach book. Later books turned the same trick with volcanoes ("Krakatoa") and earthquakes ("A Crack in the Edge of the World"). Now he's gone to sea. In "Atlantic," Winchester attempts to wrap his arms around a subject so vast that it nearly defeats him at the outset. "I wanted so much to write the story of the ocean," writes the author, an Englishman whose life has been marked by memorable encounters with the gray Atlantic. "But what and where was the structure? I was, as they say, all at sea." Casting about for a framework, Winchester latches upon Shakespeare's seven ages of man from "As You Like It": the infant, the schoolboy, the lover, the soldier, the justice, the "slipper'd pantaloon" and the childlike elder. "Pinioned within these seven categories," Winchester writes, "the stages of our relationship with the ocean could be made quite manageable." Or they could be made quite confusing to the reader, who isn't at all convinced that humans experience stages of a relationship with an ocean. Especially a stage that might be characterized as a slipper'd pantaloon. Things begin well enough. The early section of the book, which traces humanity's small steps seaward, whizzes along with insight, clarity and drama. Thousands of years ago the ancient Minoans (on today's Greek isle of Crete) ruled the mild Mediterranean waves with strong, elegant ships, but lacked the courage to venture out into the howling Atlantic. "The waters beyond" the Strait of Gibraltar, Winchester writes, "were simply too fantastic and frightful to even think of braving." Sometime around the seventh century B.C. the Phoenicians, made of sterner stuff, sailed west from what's now Lebanon, blithely passed Gibraltar and ventured north along the Iberian coast. It was, Winchester notes, "as audacious as attempting to travel into outer space: full of risk, and with uncertain rewards." Rewards came aplenty. The Phoenicians found snails capable of producing a rich purple-crimson dye that proved to be worth, ounce for ounce, up to 20 times the price of gold. More important, the Phoenicians' push out of the Mediterranean was, the author writes, "the key that unlocked the Atlantic for all time." If the Atlantic was unlocked, the world didn't exactly rush through the door. The Phoenicians departed the scene in the fourth century B.C., give or take. Columbus didn't cross the Atlantic until 1492. With the exception of a small band of Norsemen, the world's mariners were content to yo-yo up and down the Atlantic coast of Europe and Africa without ever turning west into open water- for 1,800 years! Why the long wait? Sheer terror. Winchester turns up a fantastic nugget from the Roman historian Cassius Dio, who noted that legionaries invading Britain in A.D. 43 "were so terrified at having to cross even so mild a body of Atlantic water as the Strait of Dover that they rebelled, sat on their spears, and refused to march, protesting that crossing the sea was 'as if they had to fight beyond the inhabited earth.'" The author rolls through the age of exploration with, typical Winchesterian prose: history infused with lively and colorful anecdotes, a spirit of bonhomie and a bit of British cheek. He's tough on Columbus, whom he portrays as a dim bulb for clinging to the belief that the Caribbean islands he kept bumping into were obscure pieces of Asia. "The penny never dropped - and the notion that America was a continent, and that the body of water that separated his native home from the lands he was conquering was an ocean, separate from the waters of the east, just never occurred to him." It fell to the Florentine navigator Amerigo Vespucci, who'd sailed along the coast of Brazil, to announce that the land across the sea was, in fact, a totally new continent - which made the Atlantic its own ocean. Vespucci did so in a book that was, Winchester writes, "wildly popular - helped no doubt by Vespucci's loving discussions of the cosmetic self-mutilation, anal cleanliness and sexual practices of the people he met along the way." Columbus may have discovered America, but Vespucci sold it to the masses. A few years after he published his racy little pamphlet, German mapmakers published a new world map with the continent named: America, the feminine form of Vespucci's name. But what about the name Atlantic, you say? Funny, I had the same question. The author spends five pages tracing the naming of America, yet he leaves his readers with only a vague notion about how the Atlantic Ocean - which is the title of the book - came to bear the name. Digging back through the text, I pieced it together: first used by Herodotus in the fifth century B.C., it was stuck on the map by Mercator in the early 1500s. But about the origin of the word "Atlantic" itself, there is nothing. THERE are many such moments of frustration in "Atlantic." Winchester has pulled together a remarkable assemblage of material, but much of it is presented with little rhyme or reason. Halfway through the book, reading some anecdote or other, I found myself wondering: Where are we again? Is this the age of the soldier, or the justice? What's worse, this enormous heap of information fails to cohere into a portrait of the Atlantic as a singular ocean. In a section on Atlantic-inspired artwork, for instance, we're told that the eighth-century Gaelic poet Rumann wrote one of the earliest poetic considerations of the Atlantic, but Winchester never tells us how the poem shaped historic conceptions of the sea. Similarly, he goes to great lengths to show how "The Tempest" was inspired by an actual shipwreck on the reefs of Bermuda. But he neglects to speculate about how "The Tempest" might inform our idea of the Atlantic. History is rarely as charming and entertaining as when it's told by Simon Winchester. There are fabulous set pieces in "Atlantic" - on piracy, on packet ships, on trans-Atlantic cables and the speeding up of information, on codfish, on sea bass, on plankton. But in the end there's an ocean-size hole in the book: What's it like out there? How is the Atlantic different from the Indian Ocean, or the Pacific? What we're looking for is the Atlantic Ocean's soul. And it's not here. In early times, the waters beyond Gibraltar 'were simply too frightful even to think of braving.' Bruce Barcott is the author of "The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw: One Woman's Fight to Save the World's Most Beautiful Bird."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 12, 2010]
Review by Booklist Review
Of all of Winchester's amazingly educational and entertaining books, a list that includes the best-selling The Map That Changed the World (2001) and Krakatoa (2003), his latest one is perhaps the most unique and the most creative in its approach. It is presented as a biography of an ocean! It is as if he is telling the life story of the Atlantic, and, indeed, as we learn from one of the most wondrous facts presented here, oceans actually do have life spans they have their beginnings and their endings. The Atlantic, as we are told, was born 10 million years ago by the continental split between Africa and South America, and its death will occur some 170 million years from now. The geological history of this vast body of water is partnered with the human story of habitation around it, and travel over it, because in Winchester's view, the Atlantic has functioned as the inland sea of Western civilization. His coverage of aspects of human involvement with this ocean is lively and extensive, with topics ranging from the Atlantic as represented in the arts to the effects of climate change and overfishing and from immigration patterns to the use of the ocean's waters for warfare. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Winchester's latest is bound to follow his previous books onto best-seller lists, and this one should be promoted as one of his best.--Hooper, Brad Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Winchester, bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman, returns to the natural world with his epic new book, a "biography" of the Atlantic Ocean, from its origins 370 million years ago through the population of its shores by humanity and their interactions with it. He sees the Atlantic as the vital ingredient in the blooming of Western civilization. He scrutinizes the early explorations from the Vikings and Norsemen through Columbus, detailing the perils of the open sea. With his excellent research and engrossing anecdotes about the ocean as "a living thing," Winchester spotlights its inspiration on poets, painters, and writers in its majestic beauty. Although he does not neglect the chief tragedies of the Atlantic, like the slave trade and the maritime battles, Winchester occasionally flits beelike from scene to scene, and the facts become lost in a blur. Maybe this is the price for such a monumental undertaking. Nevertheless, Winchester's sea saga is necessary reading for those who want to understand the planet better, even as, he notes, our waters are rapidly changing from pollution, overfishing, and climate change. 44 b&w illus.; 4 maps. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
How does one attempt to write a biography of a subject as old and vast as an ocean? Driven by a lifelong fascination with the Atlantic, Winchester (The Professor and the Madman) found inspiration in viewing the ocean and our relationship with it through the categories of Shakespeare's seven ages: infant, schoolboy, lover, soldier, justice, old age, and second childhood. Employing a mixture of history, science, and anecdotes from both sides of the Atlantic, he envisions the ocean's birth and eventual death and explores how its boundaries were discovered and defined, the many ways it has affected the development of human society (artistically, militarily, industrially), and humanity's effect on it in turn. Though the sheer size of the subject obviously limits how much of the Atlantic's "life" can be related in a single volume, Winchester does an excellent job at presenting an extensive collection of the most interesting parts of its existence. VERDICT Winchester is in fine form, and his typically engaging style creates a vibrant portrait of an ocean that remains endlessly fascinating. Highly recommended, especially for those who have enjoyed the author's previous works. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 6/15/10.]-Kathleen McCallister, Univ. of South Carolina, Columbia (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The prolific journalist and historian returns with a story both geographically immense and profoundly personal.Winchester (The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom, 2008, etc.) offers a tale about the Atlantic Ocean that is variably genial, cautionary, lyrical, admonitory, terrifying, horrifying and inspiring. He begins with a memory from 1963his youthful transatlantic crossing aboard the passenger liner Empress of Britainand returns to the birth of the Atlantic, perhaps 540 million years ago, providing a John McPheelike history of its formation and development. Winchester then looks at humans' "infant" acquaintance with the ocean, noting that people first settled its shores about 164,000 years ago on the western coast of Africa. They soon ventured out on the ocean, then endeavored to cross itthe Irish could have done it, he says, but there's no hard evidence. The author chronicles the stories of Leif Eriksson, John Cabot and Amerigo Vespucci, and notes that the "schoolboy" phase of the Atlantic's life includes our attempts to understand itto chart it, measure it, discover its mineral, vegetable and animal bounties and puzzle over its mysteries. For the "lover" phase of the Atlantic's history, Winchester sails across centuries of literature, art and music that in some sense celebrate the ocean. The "soldier" phase involves warfare on and around the Atlantic, from the Vikings to the Falklands. The "justice" section examines maritime laws of various sorts, from fishing to trade to communication. The concluding chapters deal with the depletion and pollution of the ocean, and the author projects a tone of both dire warning and feathered hope. Throughout, Winchester sprinkles passages of personal history, none more powerful than the epilogue about Namibia's Skeleton Coast, "a place so named because of all the skeletons, of both men and the vessels in which they had wrecked."A lifetime of thought, travel, reading, imagination and memory inform this affecting account.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
