Atlantic by Simon Winchester

Genre: Non fiction.

Atlantic ( with a long subtitle - Great sea battles, heroic discoveries, titanic storms, and a vast ocean of a million stories) is a biography of this vast ocean.

Writing a biography of the Atlantic ocean is a ambitious undertaking. How do you weave a common thread through extremely diverse fields, that may have a passing link to the Atlantic ocean ? This book does not manage to find that common thread.

What we get instead is chapters, and sub-chapters that tackle diverse topics like the geological history of the ocean, ancient and modern battles on this ocean, cities along the coast, how the west explored this ocean and found the American continents, fishing, pollution, ocean conservation etc.

The writing in the book is good, and the authors personal experiences with the ocean give it some character. Sadly, none of this is able to overcome the lack of coherence in this book.

Rating: 2 / 5, Meh, skip it.