One of Library Journal’s 10 Best Books of 2015
Following his acclaimed Atlantic and The Men Who United the States, New York Times bestselling author Simon Winchester offers an enthralling biography of the Pacific Ocean and its role in the modern world, exploring our relationship with this imposing force of nature.
As the Mediterranean shaped the classical world, and the Atlantic connected Europe to the New World, the Pacific Ocean defines our tomorrow. With China on the rise, so, too, are the American cities of the West coast, including Seattle, San Francisco, and the long cluster of towns down the Silicon Valley.
Today, the Pacific is ascendant. Its geological history has long transformed us—tremendous earthquakes, volcanoes, and tsunamis—but its human history, from a Western perspective, is quite young, beginning with Magellan’s sixteenth-century circumnavigation. It is a natural wonder whose most fascinating history is currently being made.
In telling the story of the Pacific, Simon Winchester takes us from the Bering Strait to Cape Horn, the Yangtze River to the Panama Canal, and to the many small islands and archipelagos that lie in between. He observes the fall of a dictator in Manila, visits aboriginals in northern Queensland, and is jailed in Tierra del Fuego, the land at the end of the world. His journey encompasses a trip down the Alaska Highway, a stop at the isolated Pitcairn Islands, a trek across South Korea and a glimpse of its mysterious northern neighbor.
Winchester’s personal experience is vast and his storytelling second to none. And his historical understanding of the region is formidable, making Pacific a paean to this magnificent sea of beauty, myth, and imagination that is transforming our lives.
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ONE OF KIRKUS REVIEWS’ “BEST BOOKS OF 2015
Wall Street Journal
Provocative... and lively.
Los Angeles Times
Winchester has prodigious gifts as a popular historian and an explainer of faraway events.
Telegraph (UK)
Winchester is a terrific helmsman, both confident and smooth.
New York Times Book Review
Winchester writes books like someone telling a good yarn around the fireplace... by interweaving history, fascinating trivia, and acute observation.
Seattle Times
[Winchester is] a terrific raconteur with a knack for making connections that might have eluded you between events behind the headlines. ... Where Pacific opts to go, it goes with savvy and verve.
Boston Globe
Winchester has a smooth and easy prose style, one that is trustable and clear. ... He excels at guiding the reader with a contagious sense of wonder.
Miami Herald
Fascinating, provocative, and at times, mildly terrifying. ... The hallmarks of Winchester’s best work — a fertile, curious mind, impeccable research and command of complex material — are on full display here.
New York Times
Winchester does a virtuoso job. ... A giant Aladdin’s rug, which he then gamely invites his readers to climb aboard.
Janet Napolitano
Revealing... delightful... fascinating... highly recommended.
The New York Times - Jennifer Senior
What [Winchester's] best known for is fashioning his many interests and preoccupations into a giant Aladdin's rug, which he then gamely invites his readers to climb aboard. He's a charming adventurer and chipper omnivore, part of that species of British writer who thinks nothing of taking on a cyclopean, seemingly indigestible subject and processing it into smaller, more edible bits…If a linear, traditional history of the modern Pacific is what you're after, you should probably look elsewhere. But if you're the type who ever wondered whether there was once an albatross conference in Tasmania (yes) or if there's a nation that straddles all four hemispheres (again, yes—Kiribati, a pixelated bunch of islands and atolls), this book is unquestionably for you. In Pacific Mr. Winchester is at his best when writing about science…His chapter about the discovery of hydrothermal vents on the Pacific floor leads to an eye-opening revelation about the origins of life. He is one of the few people whom you actually want to talk about the weather—his chapter explaining the wrathful storms of the Pacific has significantly improved my understanding of the earth's climate.
Publishers Weekly
07/27/2015
Earth’s largest ocean inspires expansive ruminations from renowned British journalist Winchester (The Map That Changed the World) in this far-ranging but unfocused and overwrought meditation on recent geo-history. Winchester spotlights post-WWII episodes that crystallize an increasingly Pacific-centered modernity: atomic testing at Bikini Atoll and the North Korean seizure of the USS Pueblo symbolize the horrors of the Cold War; the 1972 burning of the liner Queen Elizabeth in Hong Kong harbor symbolizes the sunset of Western imperialism; Sony Corp.’s development of transistor radios symbolizes the rising Asian industrial colossus; typhoons and bleached coral reefs symbolize the threat of climate change; the surfing movie Gidget symbolizes the globalization of Hawaii’s dolce vita. Winchester’s organizing principle—things that happen in or around the Pacific—yields little thematic coherence beyond platitudes such as “There is just one world.” The “unchallengeable superlative” of his oceanic subject stimulates his own limitless penchant for hyperbole and lurid metaphor: one surfboard manufacturer is called “powerful beyond imagination,” and he describes a wrecked warship’s cannons “lolling out of their upended casements like the tongues of the hanged Mussolinis.” Still, Winchester’s vigorous prose and tireless dragnetting of interesting lore make this an entertaining read. (Nov.)
Library Journal
09/01/2015
Covering a third of the planet's surface and containing some of its most perilous storms, unique ecologies, and troubling geopolitics, the Pacific Ocean is the stormy heart of the modern world. So argues best-selling author and retired journalist Winchester (The Professor and the Madman), whose latest book is popular history at its finest. The author tackles the last 60-odd years of Asia-Pacific history through linked stories illustrating essential patterns or developments, ranging from the globalization of the Polynesian surfing tradition to endless North Korean provocations and the (predictably) chaotic climate generated by the El Niño cycle. Adding moral weight to this storytelling, the book focuses initially on U.S. nuclear testing on Bikini and other Polynesian atolls—tests that displaced indigenous islanders, rained deadly clouds of radioactive particles on natives and American sailors alike, and rendered the Pacific the globe's "atomic ocean." Fittingly, a story that begins with American supremacy concludes with the rise of China as the new oceanic superpower. VERDICT Sure to appeal to history buffs or anyone in search of a pleasure read with surprising moral heft and geopolitical insight.—Michael Rodriguez, Hodges Univ. Lib., Naples, FL
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2015-07-15
The preternaturally curious writer about everything from the Oxford English Dictionary to volcanoes to the Atlantic Ocean (Atlantic: A Vast Ocean of a Million Stories, 2010, etc.) returns with a series of high-resolution literary snapshots of the Pacific Ocean.Winchester, who now lives in Massachusetts, does not do the expected: there is no chapter about the geological history of the ocean, followed by a slow chronology. Instead, realizing the difficulty of his own task, the author focuses on 10 aspects of the ocean and its inhabitants—islanders, those on the shores—and uses them to illustrate some historical points. He issues dire warnings about the damage we're doing to the natural world and about the geopolitical forces—especially the military rise of China—that threaten us all. Occasionally, Winchester makes what seem to be odd pairings (a chapter on both a volcano in the Philippines and the rise of China) and narrative choices (a chapter on the rise of Japan accelerated by manufacturing transistor radios), and he also looks at the international nightmare caused by the 1968 case of the USS Pueblo and North Korea. No matter what the putative subject of the chapter, though, we learn a lot about the ocean: its challenged wildlife, the swirling areas of plastic debris, the Pacific Plate, El Niño, and the Pacific's vast dimensions. As we've come to expect from Winchester, there are plenty of delights. A chapter on surfing has guest appearances by both Jack London and the Beach Boys; and the author examines America's egregious abuse of islanders during aboveground nuclear testing. Deep worries abound, as well: the dying coral reefs, climate change, and military posturing of the superpowers. The author ends with a hopeful but probably doomed wish for international fraternity. Winchester's passionate research—on sea and land—undergirds this superb analysis of a world wonder that we seem hellbent on damaging.
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