2014 read #14: Atlantic by Simon Winchester.

Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories by Simon Winchester
459 pages
Published 2010
Read from February 8 to February 13
Rating: ★★ out of 5

I've pretty much exhausted my library's stock of history and science books. If I were interested in, say, dieting or Hitler or right-skewed current events commentary, I'd be set for years to come, but I'm not, and I've dredged the shelves clean of anything that does interest me. I can ILL all sorts of things if I like, or at least I could if they'd fix the ordering system, but nothing beats taking the time to browse shelves and find titles you'd never have thought to look for. Once I get my own library card, I plan to venture afield to Suffolk's other libraries and browse their collections every couple weekends, but for now I'm stuck with whatever I haven't read already here.

Atlantic seemed promising, a nice thick book tucked away in our rather dismal science section. I assumed it would be a mix of natural history and human history, though the subtitle should have warned me that the book had no place in Dewey's 500 range. Aside from a brief prologue on the opening of Pangaea, and the de rigueur chapter on global warning, Atlantic was entirely human history. And Winchester approached it from a determinedly Euro- and American-centric perspective. The Atlantic slave trade is, to use considerable understatement, a rather important portion of the Columbian Exchange, which is probably the single most important development in the last few thousand years of human history. (Only agriculture, pastoralism, and urbanization may be said to approach it in importance.) Thus the Atlantic slave trade should have an enormous role in a book on the history of the Atlantic. Yet Winchester devotes all of thirteen pages to the topic, of which two pages are given over to a "mirror image" anecdote about a white American sold into African slavery (because the one time a white dude experiences it, it's worth exploring in detail). Winchester writes as if he is fair-minded and objective, but has a sneaky way of choosing his words to praise the "sophistication" and acumen of Europeans while dismissing, say, Native Americans as "artless."

This same sneaky tendency suffuses Winchester's discussion of climate change. He insists that a large number of impeccable researchers of high reputation uphold both "sides" of the anthropegenic climate change "argument," then goes on to snipe about the "hysteria" of climatologists and loads their "supposed" claims with doubt.

Parts of this book weren't a total wash (ha, ocean pun). Winchester writes competently well, and certain episodes, such as early Phoenician dye trade and the evolution of sailing efficiency in the last decades before steam took over the waves, were intriguing, even if they weren't given as much space as I would like.