A splendidly written account of an unseeable force.
A history of the world, with wind as the main character.
Known in Sumerian language as “lil,” in Chinese “feng,” Japanese “kaze,” and Hebrew “ruarch,” wind has been defined simply as air in motion, but it finds its way into all aspects of life on Earth. “It warms and chills, it builds and creates, it ruins and destroys,” acclaimed author and journalist Winchester writes. “But only wind’s consequences are visible.” He starts off this epic tome with a question: Could the wind be diminishing? Is the world in the grips of what some describe as a “Great Stilling,” as world wind speeds decline? Throughout the book, Winchester deploys artful descriptions of wind and its inclusion in literature, global commerce, and climate change. His recounting of a lull known as the doldrums, from the Dutch word for “dull,” vividly depicts the unsettling experience of unbearable calm on the open seas. Winchester visits places on Earth where sands sing as grains jostle against one another, takes readers into the inner workings of a Dutch windmill, explores the use of wind as fuel, and describes cyclones so aptly that you feel you are right in the midst. He considers how different things might have been, had the wind blown in a different direction, such as during the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. The prevailing southeasterly winds made its effects immediately detectable in Scandinavia. Spring westerlies instead would have spread the radiation plume over Soviet territory, where Moscow might have concealed it from the world. Winchester brings depth to the history of the wind, occasionally weighing in with opinions. He describes the early-20th-century eugenicist professor Ellsworth Huntington as “a thoroughly discreditable fellow,” but he sides with his argument for climactic determinism, which is that the cleverest and most civilized people lived in places where weather was varied and posed constant challenges. Winchester concludes that the prospect of the wind dying down on a global scale as the climate warms is less prominent now than when he started the book. “A world without wind is just too dreadful to contemplate,” he writes.
A splendidly written account of an unseeable force.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780063374454
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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