The book to buy this week is Simon Winchester's Atlantic. It's another in a string of books by Winchester about One Big Thing. This review puts it like this:
"Veteran journalist Simon Winchester has, in recent years, taken to writing what might be called geological blockbusters. His method is to focus on a relatively contained event — the eruption of Krakatoa, say, or the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 — and envelop it in several layers of context, social, scientific, historical, political."
Winchester has done the Atlantic before. In the fun little book, The Sun Never Sets (reissued in 2004 as Outposts), he visited the odd remnants of the British Empire, including, in the Atlantic, islands like Tristan de Cuhna and St. Helena, the Falklands and Ascension and Bermuda. The new Atlantic is the story of the entire ocean writ large.
(Photo of a sunset somewhere south of the equator in the Atlantic Ocean, en route between St. Helena and Ascension islands. Photos from these two islands in the St. Helena and Ascension galleries at EarthPhotos.com.)
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