The Breath of the Gods: The History and Future of the Wind

In this beguiling meditation, journalist Winchester (Knowing What We Know) catalogs the ways that humans are served, transported, delighted, and destroyed by air in motion. He begins by explaining the ephemeral dynamics that produce wind: the uneven heating of the atmosphere causes warmer, less dense air to rise vertically while colder, denser air blows in horizontally to fill the gap. On a planetary scale, this process interacts with the Earth’s rotation, seasons, mountains, and oceans to create everything from the trade winds that power international commerce to cataclysmic droughts and floods. Winchester covers the machinery that mankind has invented to exploit the wind—from great sailing ships and windmills to kites—and regales readers with tales of the awesome destructive power of wind, including the hurricane-force winds generated during the firebombing of Tokyo in 1945. Winchester’s narrative changes direction as easily as its subject, constantly breezing off into digressions on the aerodynamics of maple seeds, the chemistry of napalm, and more. He conveys all this lore in prose that’s colorful and evocative, as when he imagines the ordeal of a sailor climbing a ship’s rigging in the hellish winds off Cape Horn: “As the vessel rolls, you find yourself hanging a hundred feet directly above the boiling sea... a single ice-slick rope below you as a foot stay.” Readers will savor this. (Nov.)