The Breath of the Gods: The History and Future of the Wind by Simon Winchester; Harper, 416 pp., $35
I’m an irrepressible underliner, note scrawler, and corner folder. Over the years, I’ve developed a personal shorthand to capture my responses to what I’ve read. Simon Winchester’s The Breath of the Gods: The History and Future of the Wind compelled me to add a new symbol: “TOP,” for Turn of Phrase.
I scribbled TOP next to Winchester’s description of the jet stream as “enigmatic high-speed snakes of air.” And again, next to his evocation of Trieste’s bitter Bora wind: “It tips out of the karst valleys like ice water from a chipped saucer and then swirls into the city with terrific ferocity.” And yet again, next to this incisive couplet: “Today’s windmills do not manufacture flour. They manufacture power.” Winchester doesn’t merely capture ideas; he elevates, elaborates, denigrates, or explodes them with his words.
Winchester originally thought he’d be a geologist but then began honing his pen as a journalist at The Guardian in the 1960s and ’70s, and later at magazines such as Condé Nast Traveler, National Geographic, and Smithsonian. Among his 34 books is the celebrated Professor and the Madman, as well as five other bestsellers on everything from Lewis Carroll to earthquakes.
The Breath of the Gods moves from gentle breezes to tornadoes, along the way canvassing writers like Joseph Conrad and L. Frank Baum who took pains to describe the special violence of winds. Humans, Winchester tells us, have long attributed winds to the gods, but today, names of deities sit alongside those revered in climatological circles: Hadley, Ferrel, Coriolis, and Rossby, the scientists who discovered the global wind systems that control all biological systems on this planet. Thus, wild weather in Pakistan and scorching sunshine in Moscow may be “meshing with each other like cogs in some diabolical atmospheric weather machine, their outer bands invisibly stitched together in concert, atmospherically connected reciprocals of one another, the yin and the yang of that corner of the global circulation pattern.” This, too, received a TOP.
Winchester describes the great wind-driven migrations of the Polynesians, which likely exceeded those of Columbus, Magellan, and other European explorers. He uses quite a bit of ink describing the sailing escapades of colonizing and warring Europeans, their ships and sails and travails. If there is a part of the book that needs to luff, this was it. And yet, one naval officer in particular well deserves the attention Winchester gives him: Rear Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort, who “turned his remembrances into an enduring trope of meteorological poetry.” The eponymous Beaufort scale describes the strength of the wind from zero (calm) to 12 (hurricane force), not with values of windspeeds or wave heights but according to its perceived effect. This remarkable intuition about the wind and our relationship to it is why the scale remains so popular in the world to this day.
Winchester writes in painful detail about the most violent winds on our planet: the cyclonic gusts that dashed the finest ferry in the world against rocks in New Zealand’s Wellington Harbor—the worst maritime disaster in that country’s history—and the firestorms created by napalm bombs dropped on Japan near the end of the Second World War. Winchester contends that it was this devastation, not the atom bombs, that brought about Japan’s surrender.
My main quibble is with Winchester’s initial set piece: a trip to Mount Washington in New Hampshire, a place legendary for its extreme winds. On his arrival, however, all is placid, something Winchester presents as representative of the book’s conceit: an investigation of changing winds, including a phenomenon known as the “Great Stilling.” On average, despite ever fiercer storms, global winds are apparently slowing. The reason may be that as cold air moves out of the poles, the thermal gradients that produce wind become less pronounced. Trained as an ocean scientist, I pay close attention to stories of global changes, and I eagerly waited for more on this subject. Winchester, who wrote The Breath of the Gods over the course of a decade, acknowledges toward the end of the book that in the interim, the Great Stilling hypothesis had lost its vigor. I wish he had explained the reasons in more detail, or at least reframed the book’s beginning.
That grumble aside, in The Breath of the Gods, the wind provides a rich palette not just for Winchester’s glorious wordsmithing but also for his measured contemplation of what this invisible force has meant and will always mean to us. As only Winchester can write, “Wind in its endless train of forms, speeds, directions, qualities, seems always to be there, always to have been there, eternal and ceaselessly ‘going on,’ as with the beating waves of the seashore. As with life, if you will.”
