Simon Winchester: Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms,and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories

Winchester, bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman, returns to the natural world with his epic new book, a "biography" of the Atlantic Ocean, from its origins 370 million years ago through the population of its shores by humanity and their interactions with it. He sees the Atlantic as the vital ingredient in the blooming of Western civilization. He scrutinizes the early explorations from the Vikings and Norsemen through Columbus, detailing the perils of the open sea. With his excellent research and engrossing anecdotes about the ocean as "a living thing," Winchester spotlights its inspiration on poets, painters, and writers in its majestic beauty. Although he does not neglect the chief tragedies of the Atlantic, like the slave trade and the maritime battles, Winchester occasionally flits beelike from scene to scene, and the facts become lost in a blur. Maybe this is the price for such a monumental undertaking. Nevertheless, Winchester's sea saga is necessary reading for those who want to understand the planet better, even as, he notes, our waters are rapidly changing from pollution, overfishing, and climate change.





Simon Winchester, OBE (born 28 September 1944), is a British author and journalist who resides in the United States. Through his career at The Guardian, Winchester covered numerous significant events including Bloody Sunday and the Watergate Scandal. As an author, Simon Winchester has written or contributed to over a dozen nonfiction books and authored one novel and his articles appear in several travel publications including Condé Nast Traveler, Smithsonian Magazine, and National Geographic. Simon Winchester lives in New York and on a farm in Massachusetts. Throughout the 1980s and most of the 1990s, Winchester produced several travel books, most of which dealt with Asian and Pacific locations including Korea, Hong Kong, and the Yangtze River. Winchester's first truly successful book was The Professor and the Madman (1998) published by Penguin UK as The Surgeon of Crowthorne. Telling the story of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, the book was a New York Times Best Seller, and the rights to a film version were optioned by Mel Gibson; likely to be directed by John Boorman. Though he still writes travel books, Winchester has repeated the narrative non-fiction form he used in The Professor and the Madman several times, many of which ended in books placed on best sellers lists. His 2001 book, The Map that Changed the World focused on geologist William Smith and was his second New York Times best seller. 2003 saw Winchester release another book on the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, The Meaning of Everything, as well as the best-selling Krakatoa: The Day the World Erupted. Winchester followed Krakatoa's volcano with San Francisco's 1906 earth quake in A Crack in the Edge of the World. The Man Who Loved China (2008) retells the life of eccentric Cambridge scholar Joseph Needham who helped to expose China to the western world. Simon Winchester's latest book Atlantic: A Vast Ocean of a Million Stories was released November 2, 2010.

Bird Songs Bible: The Complete, Illustrated Reference for North American Birds

[A] copy of the new "Bird Songs Bible," a visual and audio treasure trove of the 747 breeding birds in North America. The hefty tome comes with a nifty digital audio player that quickly fills your ears with an amazing range of bird songs and calls, including the rarely heard shearwaters, who only vocalize at sea. What are shearwaters? The "Bird Songs Bible" (Chronicle Books, 536 pp.) will tell you that, too, in addition to having lovely illustrations of all the birds and maps of their habitats. The field recordings are from the esteemed Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and the book is edited by Les Beletsky, a noted bird biologist. I quickly found it's great fun to flip through the book and then punch in the number in the audio player for any bird that caught my eye. It took about two seconds for my cats to start walking all over the book, looking for the birds.

Read that full San Jose Mercury piece here. NPR's All Things Considered also did a full story on the book and author.

There's a new book out that is unlike any other — it features characters with names like Hawaii creeper and bufflehead — and strangest of all: it tweets. And it doesn't tweet in the 21st century, social media sense, but in the good, old-fashioned bird-call sense. The Bird Songs Bible is a massive volume that comes with a built-in audio player featuring hundreds of bird songs. The 10-pound, $125 tome was edited by bird expert Les Beletsky and features recordings from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. It is billed as "The Complete, Illustrated Reference for North American Birds." "I think 'bible' really says it all," Greg Budney, audio curator at Cornell, tells NPR's Robert Siegel. "It covers over 728 species of North American birds including birds of Hawaii."

See the full featured webpage on that NPR story, here. Download the podcast to that show here.

The Daily Show - November 30, 2010 - Susan Casey

Susan Casey Episode #15151 Susan Casey talks about the scientists and surfers who study and explore huge waves. (07:22) Tags: Susan Casey, interviews, books, oceans, surfing, jet skis, science, tsunamis, sports, lookin' good. Aired: 11/30/10Viewed: 49,046.

Check the full interview and show out here. See also: The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks and Giants of the Ocean, The Devil's Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America's Great White Sharks, Women Invent!: Two Centuries of Discoveries That Have Shaped Our World, by Casey'sThe Wave(Hardcover)(2010)(The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks and Giants of the Ocean)

Charlie Rose's Tuesday, August 10, 2010 conversation with Eric Pooley

CHARLIE ROSE: We continue our series of summer conversations about
the challenges facing President Obama in an assessment of what he has been
done, has done and his administration has done. We want now to talk about
the environment and climate change.

Joining me is Eric Pooley, deputy editor of "Bloomberg Businessweek"
magazine. His new book is called "The Climate War -- True Believers, Power
Brokers, and the Fight to save the Earth." I am pleased to have him back
on this program. Welcome.

You can view the full show, episode, interview here. And you can read the full transcript here.