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.

Fen Montaigne: Fraser's Penguins: A Journey to the Future in Antarctica

Fen Montaigne is a journalist and author whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, National Geographic, Outside, Smithsonian, and The Wall Street Journal. A former Moscow bureau chief of The Philadelphia Inquirer, he is the author of Reeling in Russia and has co-authored two other books. For his work on Fraser's Penguins, Montaigne was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006. He now works as senior editor of the online magazine Yale Environment 360. From: Macmillan Publishing. In December, 2010, the author and his latest book, Fraser's Penguins: A Journey to the Future in Antarctica., was a guest on the NPR program, Talk of the Nation. The podcast of that show is embedded just below.



Also in December of 2010, The New York Times wrote this about the book and author: In the austral summer of 2005-6, the veteran magazine journalist Fen Montaigne traveled to Palmer Station in Antarctica to work with the highly regarded polar ecologist Bill Fraser. For nearly five months, Montaigne gamely weighed and banded Adélie penguins and their predators, attached radio tags to feathers, dodged shooting streams of gack (giant-petrel vomit), sifted through guano in search of silverfish otoliths and reveled in the sensory delights of “the most alien and beautiful place on the planet.” But this is no straightforward work of natural history with Fraser as heroic guide. It’s a morality tale, in which Fraser plays an unsociable Cassandra who’s entrusted his tidings to a sympathetic messenger. Luckily for readers, Montaigne has wrapped his portrait of a place on the brink of oblivion inside a penguin love fest.

Thomas D. Seeley: Honeybee Democracy

In September of 2010, The New York Times said this about the book and author: What can we learn from the bees? Honeybees practice a kind of consensus democracy similar to what happens at a New England town meeting, says Thomas D. Seeley, author of “Honeybee Democracy.” A group comes to a decision through a consideration of options and a process of elimination. The bees are making a life-and-death decision: where to establish a new hive. Choosing a site that is too exposed, too small or too close to the ground can be fatal. Swarms don’t always do it right, but they do succeed a remarkable amount of the time, with 10,000 or more bees following the advice and signals of a few hundred leaders to re-establish themselves in a new location every spring. Along the way they have to make sure the precious queen, fatter and more sluggish than the others and prone to take a rest stop, is not lost. Read that NYT piece here.

hiving a swarm from a bait hive from matthew smith on Vimeo.

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 father of vertical farming from The Economist

Dickson Despommier, author of "The Vertical Farm", on the concept, what it might look like and the eco-cities of the future.

View the video here. The Economist also notes:

The idea is that skyscrapers filled with floor upon floor of orchards and fields, producing crops all year round, will sprout in cities across the world. As well as creating more farmable land out of thin air, this would slash the transport costs and carbon-dioxide emissions associated with moving food over long distances. It would also reduce the spoilage that inevitably occurs along the way, says Dickson Despommier, a professor of public and environmental health at Columbia University in New York who is widely regarded as the progenitor of vertical farming, and whose recently published book, “The Vertical Farm”, is a manifesto for the idea. According to the UN’s Population Division, by 2050 around 70% of the world’s population will be living in urban areas. So it just makes sense, he says, to move farms closer to where everyone will be living.

Read that full feature, at the Economist.com. See also: Public Produce: The New Urban Agriculture, Farms: Vertical Farming, 15 Living Walls, Vertical Gardens & Sky Farms