Simon Winchester

Atlantic is a biography of a tremendous space that has been central to the ambitions of explorers, scientists, and warriors, and continues profoundly to affect our character, attitudes, and dreams. Simon Winchester makes the Atlantic come vividly alive. Spanning the ocean’s story from its geological origins to the age of exploration—covering the Vikings, the Irish, the Basques, John Cabot, and Christopher Columbus in the north, and the Portuguese and the Spanish in the south—and from World War II battles to today’s struggles with pollution and overfishing, his narrative is epic, intimate, and awe inspiring. More than a mere history, this is an unforgettable journey of unprecedented scope by one of the most gifted writers in the English language.

Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms,and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories

Atlantic

Chris Aldrich

Simon Winchester has written a lovely poem to the Atlantic. His interestingly structured approach is as inspiring and the depth and breadth of topics he covers is nearly as broad and deep as the ocean itself.

Bryan Alexander

A very engaging, even compulsively readable book. Atlantic is a string of stories about and around that ocean.

It's an ambitious framing, asking us to rethink Western history and much of planetary science in terms of this ocean's boundaries. Winchester breaks down the topic into broad categories, into which he inserts anecdotes and short narrative: exploration of the Atlantic, commerce across the Atlantic, ecological transformation, war and piracy, literature and art, technology, oceanography, suffering and rescues.

What makes this so readable is partly Winchester's enthusiastic love of language. Each chapter contains lyrical meditations, along with intriguing etymologies. The author clearly enjoys arcane terminology, but always in a pedagogical, even puckish way. Words like "epibenthic" and terms like "Marsden squares" could stun the reader in less apt hands, but here ornament the tale.

His wry sense of humor in general offers a nice contrast to the daunting subject:
Catherine the Great persuaded a German artist based in Naples to do most of the kind of seascapes that she liked, when he asked for ideas for painting action-packed battle scenes he sent a squadron of her warships to Leghorn and had one of them blown up so he could get the general idea. (167)

Or

[Vespucci's book on the New world] was indeed 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. (94) (HT NYTimes review
Or little, offhand, fascinating observations:
[sparely inhabited Anticosti Island, in the St. Lawrence Estuary] was once owned by a French chocolatier, was nearly bought by Hitler, and now is home to a tiny community of lighthouse keepers. (145)


Atlantic is also fine storytelling. It presents vivid characters, brought to life by their ambitions, their torments, their unusual experiences. And the book does so in admirably economic style, an unusual feat for a text which also relishes lyrical sentences.

One of those characters is the author, who frequently shares stories from his nautical experience. While I'm usually suspicious of author inserts, Winchester won me over, as his autobiographical moments were brief, very informative, and did little for his ego.

The book does present some flaws, most notably its Anglocentrism. Despite the putative framing of multiple nations connected to the Atlantic, time and again the text chooses English (or British) perspectives and characters. This leaves the reader hankering for more stories from North America, from Spain, from Africa and South America. At its worst this national bias leads to embarrassing errors, like arguing that the United States stopped laying transatlantic telegraph cables for several years due to "public disappointment and official dismay" over some failures (310). Winchester fails to note that the stoppage occurred in 1859-1866, when American were, ah, rather focused on other issues.

That said, the book is a treat.

Atlantic Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms,and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories

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