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

In most of this other books, Simon Winchester has done a great job with a narrow topic. He goes off on tangents, provides interesting anecdotes and brings out interesting bits of trivia to bring alive a small event or person.

In Atlantic, he tries to tackle a larger topic, and the results are mixed. He does provide plenty of anecdotes and tangential stories. However, the central focus is missing. Just about any part of modern western civilization could be tied to the Atlantic. The book ends up doing little more than spurting out groups of semi-related facts. It is still a fairly readable nonfiction book, but falls way short when compared to his other books.

I was most impressed with the discussion of global warming. He provided one of the most intellectual honest accounts of the facts of global warming. He acknowledges there has been some mischief going on in scientific circles. However, in spite of this, there is very clear indication that the earth temperature has been increasing. There is a suspicion that this has been caused by man's activities. However, there could also be cyclical factors in play. While the Katrina hurricane season was especially severe, there have been other very calm seasons that followed. And in spite of what seems to be an increase in catastrophic events, these have been mere blips on the geological scale. (With the damage to humankind caused in part by people's propensity to locate themselves in danger zones.)

While there are some good bits in here, this is one Simon Winchester book that can easily be skipped.