Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories
Simon Winchester
I picked this up both based on the author's reputation and on my own belief that it would be a nice, well-written history of the remarkable Atlantic Ocean from a number of different perspectives and, to some extent, that's what Simon Winchester delivers in Atlantic. To another, however, he talks about this bit without actually defining what it is about the Atlantic Ocean that makes it, well, the Atlantic and not the Pacific or Indian or either of the polar seas; his text is littered throughout with references to a kind of Atlantic-ness, but never once does he address this contention, and the book suffers, condemned to flail rather than cohere. Without the appearance of this much-needed overarching theme, the chapters, arranged in a somewhat bizarre homage to Shakespeare's "All the world's a stage" speech (no, really) make little sense in relation to each other and even less within themselves. The idea of casting the waters as a being with several stages of life is less clever than cutesy, and while grouping developments such as exploration, war, and environmentalism into their own chapters makes sense, the cuts Winchester makes between them are divisive, and the individual parts are never allowed to coalesce into a single, intricate picture. He misses the ocean for the individual molecules of di-hydrogen monoxide. Even these, however, frequently become misplaced, and the book is littered with irrelevant anecdotes and irredeemably uninteresting, disruptive, and downright pointless footnotes that often have nothing at all to do with the subject at hand.
A lack of greater strategic planning is evident on a paragraph-by-paragraph level, as well, as the author seems to introduce an idea only to discard it entirely after the next indent, without so much as a line break or, heaven forbid, three dividing asterisks. All of this makes the book slightly maddening before its information is even digested, and repetition, likely borne of the deceptively haphazard organizational scheme, makes the book even more cumbersome. With all of this said, however, the book isn't all bad; it certainly contains quite a lot of interesting, if not entirely riveting, information, and Winchester does touch on several different aspects of life in, around, and on this mighty ocean. For all its faults, the book has a sense of grandiose perspective, and when the author turns his attentions to geology or the effects of modern industrialism, this sense of magnitude helps him create a persuasive argument for respect; it is also quite evident that this is, fundamentally, a love story between man and water.
Unfortunately, however, these pure instincts are also corrupted throughout the text, which is woefully anglocentric. While it seems a reasonable bet that the reason the Atlantic so captivates our intrepid author and, indeed, his intended audience, is the fact that European and North American countries (currently) exert such international prowess, there seems little excuse to ignore Africa when it isn't, you know, spawning civilization or, more criminally, the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking Americas when Great Britain isn't fighting to retain that shadow of its former empire cast in the Falkland Islands. Even worse, he makes assertions that are patently untrue and which offended even my far-from-delicate sensibilities; at one point, Winchester seriously suggests- no, asserts- that the Atlantic was the first of the world's oceans to be crossed. This is mind-numbingly stupid at its very best, as the Pacific Islands were discovered, explored, and settled long before Columbus. And it is not only this galling lapse that betrays a myopic devotion to the Atlantic that hampers Winchester's ode and actually works to diminish the Atlantic as readers frantically search to undermine the author's interminable single-mindedness. Here, then, is a case of tragically wasted potential, a book that I wanted to be engrossed by but which only served to frustrate and actively foil my attempts to like or engage with it. There is good information here, to be sure; there are excellent stories, and despite Winchester's mishandling, the idea of telling the story of the Atlantic as a, or perhaps even the, formative ocean of the modern world remains compelling. It's just a shame that Atlantic can't quite do the subject justice.
Grade: C+
Simon Winchester
I picked this up both based on the author's reputation and on my own belief that it would be a nice, well-written history of the remarkable Atlantic Ocean from a number of different perspectives and, to some extent, that's what Simon Winchester delivers in Atlantic. To another, however, he talks about this bit without actually defining what it is about the Atlantic Ocean that makes it, well, the Atlantic and not the Pacific or Indian or either of the polar seas; his text is littered throughout with references to a kind of Atlantic-ness, but never once does he address this contention, and the book suffers, condemned to flail rather than cohere. Without the appearance of this much-needed overarching theme, the chapters, arranged in a somewhat bizarre homage to Shakespeare's "All the world's a stage" speech (no, really) make little sense in relation to each other and even less within themselves. The idea of casting the waters as a being with several stages of life is less clever than cutesy, and while grouping developments such as exploration, war, and environmentalism into their own chapters makes sense, the cuts Winchester makes between them are divisive, and the individual parts are never allowed to coalesce into a single, intricate picture. He misses the ocean for the individual molecules of di-hydrogen monoxide. Even these, however, frequently become misplaced, and the book is littered with irrelevant anecdotes and irredeemably uninteresting, disruptive, and downright pointless footnotes that often have nothing at all to do with the subject at hand.
A lack of greater strategic planning is evident on a paragraph-by-paragraph level, as well, as the author seems to introduce an idea only to discard it entirely after the next indent, without so much as a line break or, heaven forbid, three dividing asterisks. All of this makes the book slightly maddening before its information is even digested, and repetition, likely borne of the deceptively haphazard organizational scheme, makes the book even more cumbersome. With all of this said, however, the book isn't all bad; it certainly contains quite a lot of interesting, if not entirely riveting, information, and Winchester does touch on several different aspects of life in, around, and on this mighty ocean. For all its faults, the book has a sense of grandiose perspective, and when the author turns his attentions to geology or the effects of modern industrialism, this sense of magnitude helps him create a persuasive argument for respect; it is also quite evident that this is, fundamentally, a love story between man and water.
Unfortunately, however, these pure instincts are also corrupted throughout the text, which is woefully anglocentric. While it seems a reasonable bet that the reason the Atlantic so captivates our intrepid author and, indeed, his intended audience, is the fact that European and North American countries (currently) exert such international prowess, there seems little excuse to ignore Africa when it isn't, you know, spawning civilization or, more criminally, the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking Americas when Great Britain isn't fighting to retain that shadow of its former empire cast in the Falkland Islands. Even worse, he makes assertions that are patently untrue and which offended even my far-from-delicate sensibilities; at one point, Winchester seriously suggests- no, asserts- that the Atlantic was the first of the world's oceans to be crossed. This is mind-numbingly stupid at its very best, as the Pacific Islands were discovered, explored, and settled long before Columbus. And it is not only this galling lapse that betrays a myopic devotion to the Atlantic that hampers Winchester's ode and actually works to diminish the Atlantic as readers frantically search to undermine the author's interminable single-mindedness. Here, then, is a case of tragically wasted potential, a book that I wanted to be engrossed by but which only served to frustrate and actively foil my attempts to like or engage with it. There is good information here, to be sure; there are excellent stories, and despite Winchester's mishandling, the idea of telling the story of the Atlantic as a, or perhaps even the, formative ocean of the modern world remains compelling. It's just a shame that Atlantic can't quite do the subject justice.
Grade: C+
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