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

I'm a fan of Simon Winchester and have read most of his books including Krakatoa and The Professor and the Madman. All good books worth reading. See my reviews.Simon wrote a good 497 page book. The book read well with no boring parts. Some parts were more interesting than others. He does skip around time wise a lot and in different parts of the Atlantic and lands touching the Atlantic. The reader gets a good history of some of the early people who used the Atlantic, including the Vikings, the Romans, the early Irish, English, Germans, Dutch, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and many more. Also there is the unsubstantiated thought of early people crossing from the West to Europe but evidence of this is not shown.Explorers Lief Ericson, Columbus, Cabot, and many more are shown and their contributions to Atlantic land exploration.Some mega millions of years ago when all the continents were together and the birth of the Atlantic is shown as well as the far mega millions of year from now when the Atlantic will cease to exist as the continents will go together again is shown.Also the vast pollution man has done to the Atlantic with oil spills and dumping of highly radioactive materials is shown as well as fishing sites , for example the Grand Banks cod industry fished out are shown. Also the near extinction of certain whales and some fish species like the Blue Fin Tuna are shown. Also the effects of global warming are shown and the rise of sea levels, glacier meltdown in Greenland and loss of ice in Antarctica are shown. Both human pumping out of greenhouse gases and the cyclical nature of the climate cycles are shown to some limited degree.Some great sea battles with sailing ships and later steel men of war and gigantic battleships are shown. Huge hurricanes and storms are shown. Some interesting B/W pictures.I'll give Simon Winchester credit, he wrote a wide sweep of information chapters about the Atlantic and human interaction with it. A little bit on a lot of subjects. There is some jumping around in the timeline of his writing that the reader has to get used to.A good book with lots of interesting stories of a wide berth of information for readers with different interests. Rated 4 stars

The enhanced version is spectacular. I'm reminded of my favorite historians - Paul Johnson, Daniel Boorstin, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto. All see change as the result of individuals - not grand social movements. People and their actions drive the narrative - not movements or theories or simple demographics. Repeatedly we see the influence of small groups (Phoenicians) and small nations (Portugal outweigh those of well-established larger empires.The structure (allegedly) derives from the famous "All the world's a stage" speech that included the Seven Ages of Man. He adapted this as the seven eras of the Atlantic, a semi-chronological beginning hundreds of millions of years ago with the first separation of Pangea. The Atlantic, we are told, is not eternal or permanent; it came into being and it will vanish.In an interview Winchester states he chose the Atlantic because that is where modern civilization emerged, that is a civilization based on ideas introduced by Europe - nationhood, representation, elections, science, education, the press, individual rights, etc. (The fact that some nations violated these does not change the narrative.)We read about unknown heroes - those first tepid explorers who sailed into the terrifying unknown for myriad reasons. We also meet many unsung heroes, men and women who made incredible contributions yet were never given their due. This is grand storytelling, almost poetic in tone. I was slightly put off by a few of the reviews but thankfully I ignored these and was amply rewarded. My grade - A

"One cannot but hang one's head in shame and abject frustration. We pollute the sea, we plunder the sea, we disdain the sea, we dishonor the sea that appears like a mere expanse of hammered pewter as we fly over it in our air-polluting planes--forgetting or ignoring all the while that the sea is the source of all the life on earth, the wellspring of us all."That environmental theme pops up quite a bit in the narrative of Simon Winchester's "Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories."Winchester set out to write a book explaining all there is to know about the Atlantic, which he considers to be our most important ocean. An overwhelming task and one might doubt it's even possible. He may not have succeeded in his initial goal but he comes as close as anyone in writing a biography of our ocean.He explains how the ocean was born, how people living on its shores reacted to it and how, most importantly, it has influenced the development of the civilized world. To do this, he tells tales of man's first attempts to go out on the water, pirates, naval battles, the development of sea-going commerce and other topics. He also includes numerous anecdotes from his personal experience with the ocean.He fears for our future if we don't change and start treating our environment like a home and not a garbage pit.I'm not opposed to space exploration. It has resulted in many benefits for mankind. Still, I wish just a portion of the money and the interest could be directed toward oceanography. This is the planet on which we live. I have no desire to go live on a barren rock where there's no other forms of life.

I have read many of Simon Winchester’s books and have liked them. This one had so much promise but for much of the book I was bored by the writing and the latter part with the denial of human impact on climate change, I doubt I’ll read an6 more of his work.

Too much unnecessary padding

This is a really excellent book on a vast subject. Simon takes The Atlantic Ocean and explains its inception eons of ages ago right up to the present day. He tells of the earliest marine life that started in its depths and crawled out of the water onto the land and became the mammals and birds that we know today. With the coming of Man he explains how - from the first tentative journeys of The Vikings to Greenland and Newfoundland to the giant fishing factory ships of today - we have irrevocably changed the ocean for ever in our endless search for more and more at the expense of what there is available. The most famous example of this was the tragedy of The Grand Banks off Newfoundland and the crash of the cod industry. At one time there had been so many fish that the boats did not need to use nets, they could put buckets over the sides and they would come up full to overflowing. With the coming of the factory ships they were fished almost to extinction and today any fishing is banned in that area of the sea.He also tells of shipwrecks and oil spillages, freak weather conditions, world wars and treasure ships that are still down there. The coming of the telegraph and then radio needed ships that could lay the giant cables that were required and it took many months to complete this operation. With the coming of air travel the great ocean liners that carried hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Europe to the US to start a new life are a relic of their former glory - did you know that the derivation of the word "liner" comes from the fact that the great ships would line up to leave port on theirtransatlantic journeys back in late Victorian times.There is so much fascinating information and stories to be had in this book that it will keep you enthralled for days - I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the sea and everything related to it and its surroundings.

Simon Winchester is a story teller and a romantic - historical context, detail and colour brings this book to life. He dedicates the book to Able Seaman Angus Campbell McIntyre who was shipwrecked in 1942 on the notorious coast of Namibia in the South Atlantic in a failed attempt to rescue survivors from the SS Dunedin who had been similarly shipwrecked. Stories like this abound.But he paints on a wider canvas to describe the importance of the Atlantic over the years - an ocean that with today's air travel does not have a high profile. For example parliamentary democracy as it is understood today was very much an Atlantic creation. No such institutions arose in Russia or China or Greece. The Icelandic Rock of Laws set the pattern for governance of the rest of the world, mimicked by the Faroe Islands, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Britain.He approaches the Atlantic from all angles, from its early exploration to pirates and the slave trade; from sea battles through the ages to commerce; from the laying of the transatlantic cable and air routes across the ocean to climate change, ocean currents and receding ice cap.The question of what motivated men to make the dangerous voyage into the Atlantic before America was "discovered" is answered by fish and whales. He makes a convincing case that the Norsemen created settlements in Newfoundland and Labrador between 975 and 1020 AD. The allure of fish, and specifically cod, drew the Vikings and the Basques as well as John Cabot who named Newfoundland before the imperial claims made by Christopher Colombus in 1492.The technical tribulations of the USS Niagra and HMS Agamemnon in laying 2,500 miles of transatlantic cable in 1857 is ascribed as the most ambitious construction project ever envisaged in the world. The visionary and financier behind the project was Cyrus Field. After only 15 days the cable succumbed to some unknown submarine malady and no further cable was laid until Brunel's Great Eastern in 1866. By 1900 there were 15 cables but then in 1901 Marconi successfully sent the first radio signal across the Atlantic. The "distance in time" across the Atlantic rapidly diminished.The immense research and colourful stories makes it another of Winchester's compelling books.

I actually found this book quite interesting. There are a lot of things to like about Simon Winchester's "Atlantic." First off, the structure of the book is quite creative. Winchester has adapted the "All the world's a stage" speech from Shakespeare's "As You Like It." Each of Shakespeare's seven stages of a man's life, from infant until second childishness, is used to examine the stages in the life of the ocean. We see the ocean born and eventually die, just as a man does. And we see all its stages in between, as man discovers, explores, interprets, uses and then misuses this grand ocean we call the Atlantic.Second, Winchester's ocean really is "a vast ocean of a million stories," and most of them are fascinating. While I enjoyed the historical chapters, more than the geological ones, Winchester has put together a book that covers nearly every aspect of interest. I was amazed to see that so much of our modern world today has grown and developed in and around the Atlantic Ocean. I did not know, for example, the "hidden story" of the eventual creation of the State of Israel. The Royal Navy's need for acetone led Chaim Weizmann, who had developed a special technique to create the substance, to come into favour with such figures as the future Prime Minister David Lloyd George and his foreign secretary Arthur Balfour. The rest of course is history and we all know how important the Balfour Declaration was in Israel's eventual independence. But "Atlantic" is filled with such stories.Third, Winchester is just a great writer and knowledgeable on a wide variety of subjects. I was endlessly amazed at all the things he's done and the places he's been. He can turn what one might think a very dull matter into a truly exciting read (for example his The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary Who would think a dictionary could be so interesting?)Fourth, I liked that he tried to be objective in his coverage of climate change and other environmental issues, showing both sides of the matter. No matter where you stand politically on some of these questions, it is hard not to see that man is doing some damage to the ocean, although much of the change may be natural.The one thing I noticed, however, was that the book could have used a better proofreader. Winchester is clearly an intellect, and so it was unfortunate that there were quite a few mistakes (additional words or spelling mistakes, for example) that took away from the polished finish.All in all, however, I would definitely recommend this book. The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary