Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this beguiling meditation, journalist Winchester (Knowing What We Know) catalogs the ways that humans are served, transported, delighted, and destroyed by air in motion. He begins by explaining the ephemeral dynamics that produce wind: the uneven heating of the atmosphere causes warmer, less dense air to rise vertically while colder, denser air blows in horizontally to fill the gap. On a planetary scale, this process interacts with the Earth's rotation, seasons, mountains, and oceans to create everything from the trade winds that power international commerce to cataclysmic droughts and floods. Winchester covers the machinery that mankind has invented to exploit the wind--from great sailing ships and windmills to kites--and regales readers with tales of the awesome destructive power of wind, including the hurricane-force winds generated during the firebombing of Tokyo in 1945. Winchester's narrative changes direction as easily as its subject, constantly breezing off into digressions on the aerodynamics of maple seeds, the chemistry of napalm, and more. He conveys all this lore in prose that's colorful and evocative, as when he imagines the ordeal of a sailor climbing a ship's rigging in the hellish winds off Cape Horn: "As the vessel rolls, you find yourself hanging a hundred feet directly above the boiling sea... a single ice-slick rope below you as a foot stay." Readers will savor this. (Nov.)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A history of the world, with wind as the main character. Known in Sumerian language as "lil," in Chinese "feng," Japanese "kaze," and Hebrew "ruarch," wind has been defined simply as air in motion, but it finds its way into all aspects of life on Earth. "It warms and chills, it builds and creates, it ruins and destroys," acclaimed author and journalist Winchester writes. "But only wind's consequences are visible." He starts off this epic tome with a question: Could the wind be diminishing? Is the world in the grips of what some describe as a "Great Stilling," as world wind speeds decline? Throughout the book, Winchester deploys artful descriptions of wind and its inclusion in literature, global commerce, and climate change. His recounting of a lull known as the doldrums, from the Dutch word for "dull," vividly depicts the unsettling experience of unbearable calm on the open seas. Winchester visits places on Earth where sands sing as grains jostle against one another, takes readers into the inner workings of a Dutch windmill, explores the use of wind as fuel, and describes cyclones so aptly that you feel you are right in the midst. He considers how different things might have been, had the wind blown in a different direction, such as during the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. The prevailing southeasterly winds made its effects immediately detectable in Scandinavia. Spring westerlies instead would have spread the radiation plume over Soviet territory, where Moscow might have concealed it from the world. Winchester brings depth to the history of the wind, occasionally weighing in with opinions. He describes the early-20th-century eugenicist professor Ellsworth Huntington as "a thoroughly discreditable fellow," but he sides with his argument for climactic determinism, which is that the cleverest and most civilized people lived in places where weather was varied and posed constant challenges. Winchester concludes that the prospect of the wind dying down on a global scale as the climate warms is less prominent now than when he started the book. "A world without wind is just too dreadful to contemplate," he writes. A splendidly written account of an unseeable force. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
