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

by Simon Winchester

Overview

"Variably genial, cautionary, lyrical, admonitory, terrifying, horrifying and inspiring…A lifetime of thought, travel, reading, imagination and memory inform this affecting account." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Blending history and anecdote, geography and reminiscence, science and exposition, New York Times bestselling author Simon Winchester tells the breathtaking saga of the Atlantic Ocean. A gifted storyteller and consummate historian, Winchester sets the great blue sea's epic narrative against the backdrop of mankind's intellectual evolution, telling not only the story of an ocean, but the story of civilization. Fans of Winchester's Krakatoa, The Man Who Loved China, and The Professor and the Madman will love this masterful, penetrating, and resonant tale of humanity finding its way across the ocean of history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780061702624
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	11/01/2011
Series:	P.S. Series
Pages:	528
Sales rank:	267,655
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Simon Winchester is the acclaimed author of many books, including The Professor and the Madman, The Men Who United the States, The Map That Changed the World, The Man Who Loved China, A Crack in the Edge of the World, and Krakatoa, all of which were New York Times bestsellers and appeared on numerous best and notable lists. In 2006, Winchester was made an officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) by Her Majesty the Queen. He resides in western Massachusetts.

Hometown:

New York; Massachusetts; Scotland

Date of Birth:

September 28, 1944

Place of Birth:

London, England

Education:

M.A., St. Catherine¿s College, Oxford, 1966

Website:

http://www.simonwinchester.com

Table of Contents

List of Maps and Illustrations xiii

Preface: The Leaving of Liverpool 1

Prologue: The Beginnings of Its Goings On 39

1 From the Purple Isles of Mogador 69

2 All the Shoals and Deeps Within 134

3 Oh! The Beauty and the Might of It 203

4 Here the Sea of Pity Lies 284

5 They That Occupy Their Business on Great Waters 376

6 Change and Decay All Around the Sea 453

7 The Storm Surge Carries All Before 543

Epilogue: Falls the Shadow, Fades the Sea 607

Acknowledgments 635

A Glossary of Possibly Unfamiliar Terms 645

Bibliography 655

Editorial Reviews

Winchester brings a knowledge as vast and deep as his subject to this history of the Atlantic Ocean.” — Entertainment Weekly

From the Publisher

Simon Winchester is one of those maddeningly gifted British writers who could probably write the history of mud and make it fascinating…Now comes Atlantic, which he describes as a "biography" of the ocean. Has he finally overreached himself? Perhaps. But what a rollicking ride he gives us anyway…What's best about Winchester's writing is his mischievous eye for the irresistible detail.
—The Washington Post

Ken Ringle

Winchester brings a knowledge as vast and deep as his subject to this history of the Atlantic Ocean.

Entertainment Weekly

As much as Bryson's collection is about science, it is also about biography and history. On that note, fans who appreciate Bryson and company's wide view of a topic should find Winchester's blend of science, story, and biography, as he tells the tale of an ocean, a good next read. Winchester writes with the same open invitation to readers to join him in exploration, and he also offers that bedrock sense that something amazing has happened and we are all lucky to get a chance to experience it. In his exploration of the Atlantic Ocean, Winchester covers epic episodes of history as well as the creation of the sea and its future. This is a massive and sustaining story. Neal Wyatt, "RA Crossroads", Booksmack!, 12/2/10

Library Journal - Booksmack!

Simon Winchester’s audiobooks deserve a genre of their own. The gifted author has created 10 books—all scientific, observational, and introspective—and proceeded to narrate all of them. His latest title, ATLANTIC, sounds too general, but the author has no trouble turning generalities into specifics, all presented with his perfect logic. Winchester’s personality enhances his eloquent word choices and elaborate sentence constructions. The author, an experienced sailor, mixes knowledge from his own seven-seas experiences into these instructional journeys to an abundance of ports in many different ages. Action-loving listeners will find plenty of piracy and plundering to keep them awake, and “verbivores” will enjoy the lexicon as much as the stories. Winchester’s fans will agree: He keeps us entertained while teaching us a lot. J.A.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine

OCTOBER 2010 - AudioFile

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 1963—his youthful transatlantic crossing aboard the passenger liner Empress of Britain—and returns to the birth of the Atlantic, perhaps 540 million years ago, providing a John McPhee–like 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 it—the 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 it—to 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.

Kirkus Reviews