Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
We live surrounded by an ever-changing ocean of air, its currents both capricious and predictable, its swirls and swells shaping the surface of our planet and the evolution of all that lives on it. To DeBlieu (Meant to Be Wild, 1991), who lives amid the shifting dunes of North Carolina's Outer Banks, the wind is the breath of divinity. It defines her spirit and her being, just as it has defined the shape of the land and the evolution of the creatures that live on it. It's the protagonist of a story that continues to unfold, and humanity is the antagonist. As DeBlieu makes clear, we have blessed the wind, cursed the wind and struggled to learn its ways. We taunt the wind, mistaking scientific understanding for mastery. As if in vengeance, the wind spreads our poisonous pollution and shifts its global patterns, producing climate changes yet to be revealed. This book's strength is also its weakness. Its story is told not in a focused narrative, but in scattered bits of science, history, personal experience, myth, mysticism and religion. The joy--and frustration--in reading such a book is trying to assemble the pieces in our mind before the next gust disperses them. Its evocative prose deserves praise, but the absence of concrete images diminishes its value to scientifically inclined readers. They will crave diagrams of wind and weather patterns, historical drawings and maps and photographs of people, birds, aircraft and research balloons. But they will find none. (July)
Library Journal
According to legend, the gentle flapping of a butterfly's wings in Brazil can trigger a cyclone in Asia. This image suggests how intricately balanced are the global winds and how they have the power to nurture or destroy life. DeBlieu's graceful writing animates this unseen force of nature.
Scientific America
DeBlieu.has a poetic touch that adds a special grace to her prose when she turns to a subject in nature.the authors provide a clear-eyed review of a large part of modern biology.
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Kirkus Reviews
Sun heats, Earth spins; there will always be wind somewhere. It has both a song and a story to tell, and natural-history writer DeBlieu (Meant to be Wild, 1991, etc.) has beautifully translated them for us. Wind is predictable (kind of) yet moody; itþs a trickster and a gangster and a life giver. Battles have been lost, civilizations vanquished, the great exploratory routes determined, all turning on the wind. As DeBlieu delightfully shows, the impact of the presence of wind on the human imagination goes back to the earliest recorded materials, to the creation myths of the Maori, the Navajo, and the people of northern Borneo, for starters, to the 12th-century wind wizardry of Lapland and the most primitive observation of animal behavior before a big blow. Fluid as her subject, DeBlieu covers much aeolian terrain: global wind systems in the troposphere, source of the world's weather; the origins of sailing craft; the fluctuations in the westerlies that send sand marauding across the Hebrides while Antarctica gets a balmy springtime; spiders trailing gossamer, making inter-island oceanic voyages; tree leaves going tubular to reduce their surface area exposed to gales. And then there are the wicked winds: the gnawing inescapable steady winds, the death-dealing oddities known as tornadoes. And there are the winds that leave medical climatologists with dry mouths: the simoom, the melteme of the Aegean, the yamo of Ugandaþthey tear away at our insulation, mess with our thermoregulationþwith many a hurricane in between, for DeBlieu's own windy patch is the Outer Banks of North Carolina. But this book is much more than a greatest hits of bad winds: it is asubtle and elegant delineation of wind per se, where a breeze has as much dignity, authority, and fascination as a tempest. The wind will never be the same for readers after finishing this book, its presence now heightened and explicated. DeBlieu has achieved the Big Two: enlightenment and high entertainment.
From the Publisher
"A stunning view of the Earth.” —Los Angeles Times “This is the kind of writing that transforms the reader’s experience of nature.” —Audubon Magazine “The wind will never be the same for readers after finishing this book. DeBlieu has achieved the Big Two: enlightenment and high entertainment.” —Kirkus Reviews “A poetic compendium of wind phenomena and a hymn of praise to these towering movements of air.” —San Francisco Chronicle “One of the best nonfiction books I can remember.” —Robert Michael Pyle “DeBlieu’s graceful writing animates this unseen force of nature.” —Library Journal, Best Sci-Tech books of 1998
FEB/MAR 01 - AudioFile
DeBlieu has written a wonderful book of poetic description, scientific information, and conversation with hosts of people who in one way or the other have been shaped by wind. Suzanne Toren has done an equally inspired job in the narration, handling the text with elegant phrasing. The variety of voices and accumulation of information demand versatility, and the listener can only admire the muscular and musical virtuosity of Toren’s presentation. Our attention is sustained, allowing us to be caught up in the wind’s “boulevards and tendril streets” and its countless stories and adventures. We will never again be indifferent to the phenomenon that flows in and around the way we live. J.H.L. © AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine
