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

Using as his central pillar a Shakespearean monologue from As You Like It that lists the seven stages of a man’s life, Simon Winchester offers us the life of an ocean. He covers a very wide swath in his examination of that very un-pacific Atlantic. Beginning with big-picture geology, he looks at the......more

Oh, dear, Simon Winchester, I think you have to stop being my literary boyfriend now. Someone get this man an editor, quickly. I've never skipped over so many pages of a book before. It's not that he hasn't dug up fascinating facts and interesting tidbits. It's just that it feels like he took all his......more

"… gray and heaving, washing and waiting, extending out to the deeps … " The inside flap of Simon Winchester’s lengthy chunkster ATLANTIC is a great summary of the book in general terms: "ATLANTIC is a biography of a tremendous space that has been central to the ambitions of explorers, scientists,......more

Winchester has had a lifetime of Atlantic crossings, and can weave his personal accounts in with those of vast numbers of other voyagers down the centuries. It's a rambling and enthusiastic book, full of historical lore and incredibly detailed vocabulary. It features the drama of geological plate te......more

This is a very enjoyable book; it covers many aspects of the Atlantic Ocean. The book describes its formation and its ultimate end, exploration, the use of the ocean for commerce, for food, for battles, and the inspiration the ocean has for literature, art and music. And of course, the book contains......more