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
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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