Wind: How the Flow of Air Has Shaped Life, Myth, and the Land

by Jan Deblieu

Overview

The winds of the world have sculpted the land and all aspects of nature, but they've also shaped humans -- histories, cultures and settlements. Ephemeral and powerful, the wind is impossible to capture in a single phrase or image. In Wind, Jan DeBlieu sets out to better understand this force of nature by exploring its many aspects and effects, large and small, in a quest that spans the United States.
She visits a weather observatory at the summit of Mount Washington, talks to survivors of a deadly tornado in Iowa, tries hang gliding in North Carolina, and climbs sand dunes in Oregon and slickrock formations in Utah. DeBlieu lives on one of the most wind-plagued landscapes on the earth, North Carolina's Outer Banks, where the winds have shaped the contours of the islands, the migrations of birds and fish, and the customs and character of the residents. In poetic prose she seamlessly interweaves her life experiences with scientific research to compelling and enriching result.
Winner of the John Burroughs Medal for Natural History Writing, Wind brings us closer to a force that affects us all.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781593760946
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	05/01/2006
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Jan DeBlieu is the author of four nonfiction books to date and is a national medalist in literature. She has led writing workshops and clinics for all ages, in addition to teaching undergraduate and graduate creative writing courses. From 2016 until mid-2020, she was an Associate Professor with the University of Alaska Anchorage Low Residency Master's of Fine Arts program in creative writing. She is also known for her work as a conservationist and activist.

Editorial Reviews

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)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

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.

Library Journal

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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Scientific America

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.

Kirkus Reviews

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

From the Publisher