It rarely gets much respect.  Whether we're trying to fly over it, abusing it as a source of food or using it as receptacle for myriad wastes, we don't often stop to think much about the Atlantic Ocean.  As a Midwestern landlubber, I must confess that most days pass without any Atlantic oriented thoughts.   Acclaimed author Simon Winchester tries to remedy this sorry situation with Atlantic, a comprehensive biography of this fascinating and ever changing body of salt water.

Winchester suggests that while the Mediterranean Sea served as the cradle for the classical western world, the Atlantic Ocean served a comparable role in the formation of the modern western world.  He explores the ocean's role in the advancement of science, government, industry and international relations, convincingly supporting this thesis. 

Winchester starts the story with the Atlantic's birth - about 195 million years ago - as it filled the ever widening gap created by the violent splitting of Pangea.   He then jumps to the seventh century B.C., when the Phoenicians first began to explore the waters beyond Gibraltar.  Dividing the story into seven large chapters, he outlines the course of humanity's Atlantic interactions from fearful infancy to attempted domination and seemingly inevitable destruction.  Including the full expanse of human endeavor, he explores discovery and exploration, art and literature, warfare, business and government, environmental degradation and climate change in a consistently riveting style. 

One might think that covering almost 3000 years of tumultuous human history in about 450 pages would result in excessive use of boring generalizations and oversimplification, but Winchester has a knack for weaving in plenty of intriguing details and unique stories, keeping me interested and engaged throughout.   From the Basque-led birth of the cod industry to Guglielmo Marconi's efforts at transatlantic radio transmission; from the Falklands War to a behind-the-scenes look at air traffic control in the middle of the ocean; Winchester covers an incredible amount of territory, understandable given the 33 million square miles of water that is his subject matter.

One of the reasons this book works so well is that much of it is a personal story.   As a native Brit, Winchester clearly takes some pride in his birth country's Atlantic heritage.  Many of the stories he tells are linked to his own experiences, starting with a voyage on the Empress of Britain - a transatlantic passenger liner - as a young man in 1963; and including a subsequent trip to St. Helena - one of the tiniest inhabited islands in the South Atlantic - and a recent trip to Namibia's Skeleton Coast.  His own individual insights add an interesting angle to much of the history, making it more than just an extended chronology of events. 

Not surprisingly, a book about the ocean includes plenty of seafaring jargon with which I'm not familiar and Winchester thoughtfully includes a helpful glossary at the end of the book.  But the author is also a word hound, having displayed this passion in previous works about the Oxford English Dictionary, including The Professor and the Madman, a book I recently enjoyed.  I've been reading for quite a few decades now and it's pretty unusual to come across a word that I'm sure I've never seen before, but this book includes more than a dozen words that were new to me, prompting me to make a list.  Now if you already know what adumbration, captious and pullulate mean, you may not be impressed, but I found Winchester's vocabulary stretching antics to add an entertaining challenge to my reading experience.

Atlantic is most properly classified as a history book, as Winchester only briefly touches on other topics such as oceanography or the biological sciences.   But even with these perfectly reasonable restrictions, the man never seems to run out of captivating chronicles and I would have been happy to read more.   Possibly his most ambitious work to date, and quite obviously a work of love, Atlantic is up to Winchester's high standards and thoroughly establishes him as one of my favorite writers, even if I have to have a dictionary nearby to read his work.



Gentle readers may wish to read my review of The Professor and the Madman. 


Recommended: Yes