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A Natural History of The Wind Invisible. Invincible. Eternal. Essential. An urgently-needed portrait across time of the unseen force - unseen but not unfelt - that respects no national borders and no vessel or structure lying in its path. Wind, the movement of the air, is seen by so many as a heavenly creation and generally a thing of essential goodness. But when it flexes its invisible muscles, all should take care and be very afraid. Wind is an unseen and mysterious force that can do many things, perform many tasks, create unimaginable mayhem. It can produce power and energy in mills and weathervanes and turbines. It can damage and destroy anything that lies in its path. It can fan a forest fire and it can extinguish a candle. It can fill a spinnaker and drive a sailboat so that it seems to fly across the sea. In a capricious instant it can pitchpole or capsize a craft of any size and send it sinking to its doom. But a world without wind would have no weather, no climate, no change, no variety, no life. Wind is the world''s most vivid manifestation of itself as a living planet, and for which all should show gratitude, and take comfort for the fact of its unseen existence. The three core chapters of the book present the wind itself in a series of broad categories of ever-growing power: Gentle, Robust and Terrifying . Within each of these three sections there are, among many other things, Winchester''s own narrative descriptions of such locally-famed and named winds that fall within these three broad classes. There are more than four hundred such locally-named winds, from Morocco''s aajej to the zonda of southern Argentina. Winchester concentrates his experiences of at least a dozen of them.
About the author
Simon Winchester is the bestselling author of Atlantic, The Man Who Loved China, A Crack in the Edge of the World, Krakatoa, The Map That Changed the World, The Surgeon of Crowthorne (The Professor and the Madman), The Fracture Zone, Outposts and Korea, among many other titles. In 2006 he was awarded the OBE. He lives in western Massachusetts and New York City.
