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

by Simon Winchester

New York Times bestselling author Simon Winchester returns with a thought-provoking history of the wind, written in his edifying and entertaining style.

What is going on with our atmosphere? The headlines are filled with news of devastating hurricanes, murderous tornadoes, and cataclysmic fires affecting large swaths of America. Gale force advisories are issued on a regular basis by the National Weather Service.

In 2023, a report was released by atmospheric scientists at the University of Northern Illinois, warning that winds—the force at the center of all these dangerous natural events—are expected to steadily increase in the years ahead, strengthening in power, speed, and frequency.

While this prediction worried the insurance industry, governmental leaders, scientists, and conscientious citizens, one particular segment of society received it with unbridled enthusiasm. To the energy industry, rising wind strength and speeds as an unalloyed boon for humankind—a vital source of clean and “safe” power.

Between these two poles—wind as a malevolent force, and wind as savior of our planet—lies a world of fascination, history, literature, science, poetry, and engineering which Simon Winchester explores with the curiosity and vigor that are the hallmarks of his bestselling works. In The Breath of the Gods, he explains how wind plays a part in our everyday lives, from airplane or car travel to the “natural disasters” that are becoming more frequent and regular.

The Breath of the Gods is an urgently-needed portrait across time of that unseen force—unseen but not unfelt—that respects no national borders and no vessel or structure in its path. Wind, the movement of the air, is seen by so many as a heavenly creation and generally a thing of essential goodness. But when it flexes its invisible muscles, all should take care and be very afraid.

Genres: Nonfiction, Science, History, Nature, Environment, Audiobook, Science Nature

386 pages, Hardcover

First published November 18, 2025

About the author

Simon Winchester, OBE, is a British writer, journalist and broadcaster 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.

In 1969, Winchester joined The Guardian, first as regional correspondent based in Newcastle upon Tyne, but was later assigned to be the Northern Ireland Correspondent. Winchester's time in Northern Ireland placed him around several events of The Troubles, including the events of Bloody Sunday and the Belfast Hour of Terror.

After leaving Northern Ireland in 1972, Winchester was briefly assigned to Calcutta before becoming The Guardian's American correspondent in Washington, D.C., where Winchester covered news ranging from the end of Richard Nixon's administration to the start of Jimmy Carter's presidency. In 1982, while working as the Chief Foreign Feature Writer for The Sunday Times, Winchester was on location for the invasion of the Falklands Islands by Argentine forces. Suspected of being a spy, Winchester was held as a prisoner in Tierra del Fuego for three months.

Winchester's first book, In Holy Terror, was published by Faber and Faber in 1975. The book drew heavily on his first-hand experiences during the turmoils in Ulster. In 1976, Winchester published his second book, American Heartbeat, which dealt with his personal travels through the American heartland. Winchester's third book, Prison Diary, was a recounting of his imprisonment at Tierra del Fuego during the Falklands War and, as noted by Dr Jules Smith, is responsible for his rise to prominence in the United Kingdom. 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 Mel Gibson optioned the rights to a film version, likely to be directed by John Boorman.

Though Winchester still writes travel books, he 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 Whichester's second New York Times best seller. The year 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 Exploded. Winchester followed Krakatoa's volcano with San Francisco's 1906 earthquake 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. Winchester's latest book, The Alice Behind Wonderland, was released March 11, 2011.
- source Wikipedia

Reviews

[Brendan (History Nerds United) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Author Simon Winchester needs to be stopped. This mad scientist of a writer wrote his last book on knowledge. Are you looking for me to be more specific? I can't. It was on all of human knowledge. Apparently, such a challenge was too undemanding. Winchester has now decided to take on wind (yes, just wind) in The Breath of the Gods. And guess what? It's another triumph. There will be no stopping him, apparently. For goodness sake, he'll probably write about the dictionary next. Wait, he already did!?

What I enjoyed about The Breath of the Gods is what I also enjoyed about his most recent previous book, Knowing What We Know. They both feel like a conversation with a friend on a park bench with perfect weather. His prose forces you to slow down and consider the little things. What you get is a mixture of personal stories, epic tales, and some forgotten people. Just for example, the book contains sections on the following: tumbleweed, windmills, Typhoon Tip, napalm, and D-Day.

Do those sound like things that have no connective tissue? I thought so too, but here we are. It's another wonderful aspect that I think if you deleted Winchester's book and forced him to write it again, you would probably end up with a completely different book. It would still be about the wind, but the topics contained within would change. This isn't to say the book is in any way arbitrary. It is just another way to say that Winchester has complete control over the topic to the point that he could swerve the entire narrative with ease.

For goodness sake. The man will probably just write about land next. Oh my God, he already did that, too!

(This book was provided as a review copy by Harper Books.)

[Joy D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Simon Winchester’s latest expansive historical and scientific topic is the wind. The book is structured around the Beaufort Scale (0-13, from calm to storm). It covers ancient civilizations' naming of winds, the consequences of significant wind related events, and concerns about climate change. It includes such topics as wind measurement, ocean storms, natural disasters, the spread of radioactivity, notable local winds, and much more.

Winchester analyzes how different history could have been if winds had blown differently, particularly at Chernobyl and bombings during WWII. He includes minute-by-minute accounts of specific shipwrecks and firestorms. As is usual in Winchester’s works, this book is wide-ranging and global. It starts slowly and gains momentum. The writing is erudite, with snippets of dry humor. I always enjoy Winchester’s works. I find them educational and entertaining. Recommended to readers interested in a combination of history and science.

[Vasil Kolev · Rating 2 out of 5]

So many peripheral, unconnected stories, so little about the actual climate systems or anything really related to wind. Maybe half, even less of the book should've been left after editing.

[Michael Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

I haven’t yet read a Simon Winchester book I didn’t enjoy. This one did surprise me, because I didn't think a book about "moving air" would be one of my favorites of the year. It sounds boring, but Winchester delivers a fascinating amalgam of history, science, adventure stories, and human drama (and tragedy).

I learned but it wasn't like reading a textbook. It explains how wind works, from the larger (Synoptic-scale) systems that drive global weather down to the more local (mesoscale) systems that shape our everyday weather. The science is really interesting and never dry, primarily because he illustrates it with so many excellent stories: sailors crossing oceans under wind power, sailors battling immensely powerful storms at sea, scientists working to understand weather phenomena, and accounts of storms (from hurricanes to tornadoes, to microbursts of wind) whose destructive power is almost unimaginable.

Some of the stories will stay with me, especially the stories from the age of sail. Winchester is a gifted storyteller, and he uses his gift to help me visualize and feel the winds he describes.

Most of us don’t think much about wind; I certainly didn’t. I notice it only when it becomes inconvenient or dangerous. By the end of the book I was more aware of how it shapes our weather, history, transportation systems, energy production, and many other aspects of my everyday life.

The book does touch (briefly) on the ways changing atmospheric conditions may affect the future, but it isn’t a political tract. He acknowledges the potential issues and consequences without allowing them to overwhelm the story he's telling.

The narrative occasionally wanders like a collection of fascinating side-quests connected by a common theme. But I found those detours so much fun that I didn’t really mind much.

I do wish he had given a little more attention to the "future" of wind (mentioned in the subtitle).

My criticisms are minor. This is an example of very good popular nonfiction. It’s educational, entertaining, thoughtful, and filled with fascinating stories. I believe I have a deeper understanding of something I hadn’t really thought about before.

[John Newton · Rating 1 out of 5]

Having read several other works by this author, I had high hopes for this book. But my hopes were dashed again and again by his bombastic style, egregiously long run-on sentences (one stretched for half a page or more), excessive detail… and the list could go on.

[Melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating as always. Some people have voices that are so powerful that they could read a phone book and make it interesting. Winchester can write about anything and make it exciting, captivating, and inspiring.

[Laura✨ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some interesting parts, but not my favourite Winchester by far. Also, his narration in this one was terrible (though I don't remember not liking it in past books).

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m not normally a non-fiction reader and it took me a while to get through it but overall a very interesting book! Made me think about how wind affects our daily lives without us even really thinking about it; a little bit nerdy but very cool!

[Nigel Molesworth · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reading this book is rather like enduring a series of very loosely connected monologues from an aged relative.

"Sure is windy today, Gramps."

"Wind! That reminds me of a story. It was back in World War II. Preparations for D-Day were underway, and the weather forecast was critical..."

"Pretty windy out there, Gramps."

"Wind! That reminds me of a story. One of the fiercest naval battles of the Age of Sail. The Spanish Armada was..."

"Gee, listen to that wind, Gramps."

"Speaking of wind, did you know that the oboe is the world's most beautiful-sounding musical instrument? Now, that's not an opinion, that's an objective fact. You see, the double reed of the oboe is fashioned from..." [There really is a six-page lecture on this in the book.]

"Excuse me, Gramps, but what does wind have to do with the oboe?"

"Well, it's a WIND instrument, isn't it? Don't they teach you anything in that school of yours?"

"Wow, Gramps, look at those snow drifts."

"Reminds me of my days in the Sahara. You know, wind piles up flakes of snow and grains of sand in much the same way. [The following is an actual quote from the book.] The seasons, however, bring a welcome physical change of state to snowfalls. The regular onset of warmer springtime weather causes the snow to melt, the water's wintertime solid phase to be returned to its customary liquid phase, and then to be absorbed as liquids can be, either into the unfrozen ground or up into the gaseous atmosphere. With such changes duly made, the many challenges of winter snow start to vanish, and come soon to be regarded as only a matter of temporary inconvenience. Sand, however, does not enjoy the benefit of any phase change, no matter the environment that envelops it."

"So I think what you're trying to tell me, Gramps, is that snow melts but sand doesn't?"

"Well, you may have missed a few of the finer points..."

"You're a nice guy, Gramps, but did anyone ever tell you that you're kind of a blowhard? You know, a windbag?"

"Are you insinuating that I'm verbose, prolix, wordy, repetitious, redundant?"

"Yeah. One might even say you're... long-winded."

[Don Healy · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a sailor, I absolutely loved this book, but if you’ve ever marveled or even wondered about the wind, you also will find it fascinating.
The Sumerians did. Credited with the world’s first written language they are also credited with having the first written name for something that is invisible, “lil”. Wind.
Simon Winchester’s encyclopedic collection of stories about wind related topics from the obvious, storms, to the less obvious, e.g. Kuahiwi home on Oahu admired for its beauty and wonderful use of site-specific wind patterns, should satisfy any of its wind-curious readers.
It is indeed a breath of fresh air as well as The Breath of the Gods. I’ve always found wind mystical. Something invisible that can move us, frighten us provide us with power and life.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love the subject matter and enjoyed his stories about wind. However, I struggled a bit with his writing style. Too many very long, run-on sentences and lots of technical & British words that weren't even in my American English dictionary.

[Peter Corrigan · Rating 1 out of 5]

A shockingly bad book. I had every reason to love the subject but there is a reason that people retire (or should) and that goes for writers too! Hardly know where to start and I really don't want to waste much time on it. -1 star for no footnotes, -1 for bloviation and padded writing, -1 for irrelevant and off-topic tangents, -1 for repetitious editorializing and moral posturing (the Japanese are poor victims and the Americans war criminals--never forget that!), -1 for random errors of fact (and not small ones, see pg. 322 for a whopper), -1 for omissions of key figures in the scientific history of wind (namely Mathew Fontaine Maury, Albert Betz, Vilhelm Bjerknes, Zhenzhong Zeng, et al). That puts us at -1 from a 5-star, I'll give +1 for the topic itself and +1 for some interesting revelations (namely the notion of a 'Great Stilling'). Added up that makes a 1 overall, which is more than I'd like to give it.

[Charlie · Rating 3 out of 5]

More of a history book than a meteorology book.

There were some interesting sections and the general idea was good. I think the execution could have been better.

The author reads the audiobook, but it would have been better if a professional voice artist had been employed. As a reader, the author has a very slow and breathy presentation style which, I found, made it difficult to listen to.

I would have liked more of the science behind the different wind patterns. Take fire storms, for example. The author seems much more interested in when and why fire storms have occurred through human intervention, e.g. using napalm, than in the air movement patterns involved. The history of the creation and use of napalm was discussed at some length. But why winds don’t just rush in from all directions equally, as the heat goes up, and put the flames out was not. The science of this was very cursorily and not very convincingly covered. In a book ostensibly about the winds, I would have preferred more and better science.

At the start he tells us that wind patterns are changing, possibly because of man-made climate change. Then he tells us about each kind of wind, from gentle to fierce, and how mankind has used or interacted with it through history. I had hoped that he would return at the end to a section on the future and elaborate more on his introduction about the effects of climate change, but this did not happen.

[Amy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have loved multiple Simon Winchester books through the decades. I have been a faithful reader. I have marveled at his depth, breadth, and perspicacity on multiple interesting subjects. However, for this book, I noticed an untrue and unfair assertion plus another unnecessary politicalization… throwing in his politics and his resentment rather than sticking to the wind. It was a turn-off. I’m tired of the school of resentment and apparently Winchester is not immune to the virus. I didn’t finish the book.

[Sarah Cupitt · Rating 4 out of 5]

ok so the same moving air that cools your skin, carries the smell of rain, and nudges leaves on a tree can also strip soil from a continent, topple buildings, and power entire countries.... yeah

notes:
- The South African naturalist Lyall Watson sketched a Biological Wind Scale that begins with a straight plume of chimney smoke, then a slight lean, then the first touch of wind on the face
- Plants rely on that subtle motion.Most cannot move themselves, so their seeds must.
- Maples and sycamores use stiff wings called samaras that act as small spinning blades, slowing their fall and letting the wind push them sideways as they descend
- When the first astronauts landed on the moon in July 1969, viewers saw a flag beside them that seemed to ripple.In reality the moon has no meaningful atmosphere and therefore no wind at all, so engineers had hidden a rigid bar along its top edge to hold it out.That bit of stagecraft points to the basic rule behind every breeze: wind only exists where there is air to move and some source of energy to disturb it.
- moving air is the atmosphere, a shell of gases wrapped around the planet and pinned in place by gravity (and casually weighs about 5.5 quadrillion tons?)
- Most of the weather and almost all winds that affect daily life unfold in the lowest slice, the troposphere, which extends only a few miles up before a boundary marks the start of the calmer stratosphere above
- Near the equator, strong heating drives rising air that spreads poleward aloft and sinks again around the subtropics; these loops are the Hadley cells.In midlatitudes, Ferrel cells link that sinking air to the surface westerlies, while nearer the poles, cold polar cells move dense air outward from the ice caps.

on wind power:
- Prairie wind pumps, sold from the 1880s onward, use nothing but moving air to haul water from deep wells into stock tanks, keeping livestock and families supplied in territory that might otherwise be hard to inhabit.Sailors mastered that same working power at sea even earlier.River craft on the Nile once could only drift downwind, but sailors learned to reshape sails and rigging so vessels could angle across the wind and even claw upwind.
- wherever breezes were reliable, they could be treated as a patient, unpaid workforce.In the late nineteenth century, inventors began asking wind to make electricity.
- In 1887 Scottish engineer James Blyth built a cloth-sailed generator that charged batteries and lit his cottage
- Hundreds of thousands of turbines operate worldwide, and wind already supplies more than half of Denmark’s electricity and significant shares in economies such as Germany and China
- Just before Christmas 1974, a tropical system in the Arafura Sea tightened and turned toward Darwin in northern Australia.In the early hours of Christmas Day, gusts reached 217 kilometers per hour before instruments failed; by dawn about 90 percent of the city’s houses lay wrecked and tens of thousands of residents had been flown out in an emergency airlift while a new, storm-hardened Darwin was planned and built.Events like these help explain why, in 2013, Admiral Samuel J.Locklear III, then commanding more than 300,000 US personnel in the Indo-Pacific, warned that rising seas, displaced populations, and more violent cyclones linked to climate change could pose a greater long-term threat to security than rival states.The same moving air that can carry seeds, turn mills, and drive turbines is also reshaping where people live and where they will be forced to start again.
- The faster the air moves, the faster the cups whirl, and gears in the base turn that motion into a dial reading in familiar units.Tables of drag for different shapes, already circulating among Victorian engineers, let Robinson link cup speed to wind speed with useful accuracy, and versions of his anemometer still stand on masts and rooftops around the world.

[Elyse · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5

This was really good. I love how the information is presented because it's very easy and fun to consume. However, despite my brother being a meteorologist and trying to get me into weather for years, I'm just not. The subject isn't for me and won't stick. But I think this book would be a great starting point for those interested in the subject.

[Kalyan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a long book. Really long. The audiobook is about 13 hours, which is much longer than the usual 6 to 9 hours I expect.

The narration is done by the author himself. His voice is quite flat and blunt, and at first it felt like someone narrating without much vocal range. It took time to get used to, but eventually I did. Since he wrote the book and narrated it himself, I am okay with that choice.

The book covers many things. It moves across history, science, language, and culture. It starts from how wind was named or mentioned and goes all the way through world wars and modern times. The author constantly moves back and forth across topics, and that wandering style is clearly part of the book’s intent.

What surprised me is that someone can write a book this long about a single natural force and still keep going. There are no big surprises here. By the title alone, you already know what kind of book this is.

My opinion is biased. I like boring books. I like long chapter books, science books, and long essays. Because of that, I do not strongly recommend or discourage this book for others.

For me, I liked it. I would rate it 3 out of 5. It is a good book in the sense that it meets expectations. It delivers exactly what it promises and nothing more. There are no surprises, and that is why I was satisfied.

Would I read this author again? Probably yes.

[LillyBooks]

DNF page 35.

There’s probably nothing wrong with this nonfiction book, but it turned out it wasn’t a topic that interested me (meteorology). I put it on hold because I’ve enjoyed a couple of Winchester’s previous works, but I should have paid more attention to the topic. I did enjoy the prologue/first chapter about the anthropological roots of words for and beliefs about the wind.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of those expansive (might we say airy) books about a topic that seems too narrow to be a book, but someone like Simon Winchester can really pull it off. Would not be everyone’s cup of tea I’m sure but I’m happy to have read it. Of course, the reader is (ahem) blown about in many directions but there’s a lot of interesting stuff and good writing.

[Martin Alswang · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant. A must!

[Tamara York]

DNF at 30% on audio. I like this author’s books a lot but I’m just not that interested in the wind I guess.

[Carl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating book. Part history, part geography, part meteorology. Highly recommend to those that are fans of Winchester and the subjects listed.

[Jung]

"The Breath of the Gods: The History and Future of the Wind" by Simon Winchester invites the reader to notice something so constant it is usually ignored: the moving air that surrounds every moment of human life. Even on days that seem calm, the atmosphere is never truly still. Tiny clues - a drifting wisp of smoke, seeds floating away, a sudden shift in scent - reveal that we live submerged in a vast, invisible ocean of air. Winchester’s central idea is that wind is not merely background weather but a force that connects ecosystems, shapes civilizations, drives economies, and increasingly defines the future of energy and climate. By tracing wind from its faintest whispers to its most destructive power, the book reframes something ordinary as one of the planet’s most consequential actors.

The story begins with the quietest movements of air, the breezes so gentle they barely register as wind at all. Winchester shows how even these light currents have profound effects. Smoke from distant wildfires can travel thousands of miles, dust can cross continents, and seeds can spread far beyond the reach of their parent plants. What appears to be stillness is actually constant motion, especially higher in the atmosphere where steady flows transport particles through the layers where weather and pollution mix. Humans have long relied on their own senses to interpret these subtle winds, reading smoke, dust, and physical sensation as informal measuring tools. Plants, unable to move themselves, depend even more heavily on this restless air. Feather-light seeds, spinning samaras, and rolling tumbleweeds are all biological adaptations that turn wind into a delivery system, sometimes with unintended consequences when invasive species spread across entire landscapes. These examples make clear that even the weakest winds quietly reshape the natural world.

From these small-scale effects, Winchester zooms out to explain where wind comes from at all. Wind exists because Earth has an atmosphere and because the sun heats the planet unevenly. As land, sea, and ice absorb sunlight differently, warm air rises and cooler air rushes in to replace it. This simple process, multiplied across a rotating, tilted globe, creates vast circulation systems that encircle the planet. These systems organize winds into recognizable patterns - the trade winds, the westerlies, and the jet streams - that influence climate, weather, and human settlement. The atmosphere’s lowest layer, where most weather occurs, becomes a stage on which solar energy, gravity, and rotation interact continuously. Understanding these large-scale patterns explains why certain regions prospered through navigation and agriculture while others endured extremes of heat, cold, or storms. Wind, in this sense, becomes one of the invisible architects of history.

Once humans understood these patterns, they learned to exploit them. Winchester traces how wind shifted from an environmental force into a tool for survival and progress. Sailing civilizations learned to read and ride prevailing winds to move goods, people, and ideas across oceans. On land, windmills and pumps turned air into mechanical labor, grinding grain or lifting water in places where other resources were scarce. In regions like the Netherlands, wind power made the difference between inhabitable land and flooded marsh. On the American plains, simple wind-driven pumps sustained farms in otherwise unforgiving territory. These technologies treated wind as a dependable worker - free, renewable, and persistent. Eventually, inventors began converting that motion into electricity, setting the stage for modern wind energy.

The development of wind power as a source of electricity marks a turning point in the book. Early experiments were modest, lighting single homes or charging small batteries, but over time turbines grew taller, blades longer, and systems more efficient. By the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, wind farms had become major contributors to national power grids. Winchester emphasizes that this transition is not merely technological but cultural. Societies that once viewed wind as unpredictable or destructive began to see it as a strategic asset. In countries with consistent wind resources, turbines now generate a substantial share of electricity, offering an alternative to fossil fuels and a partial answer to climate concerns. The same force that once filled sails and turned millstones now powers cities.

To harness wind effectively, however, people had to learn how to measure it. Winchester explores the challenge of quantifying something invisible and constantly changing. Early attempts were crude and imaginative, but over time more reliable instruments emerged. Devices like the cup anemometer transformed spinning motion into numerical readings, while standardized scales translated wind strength into observable effects. These systems allowed sailors, engineers, and meteorologists to communicate clearly about conditions and risks. Yet the book makes clear that measurement can never fully capture how wind behaves. Numbers help, but experience and observation still matter, especially when winds grow violent.

The darker side of wind emerges in the book’s exploration of extreme events. Winchester recounts how prolonged drought and relentless winds combined to create the Dust Bowl, lifting fertile soil into massive clouds that darkened skies far from their origin and destroyed livelihoods across the Great Plains. Entire communities were displaced as land itself seemed to vanish. Elsewhere, regions learned to adapt to recurring strong winds by reshaping architecture and daily life, building homes and cities designed to withstand regular gales. Tropical cyclones, however, show how devastating wind can become when combined with heat and moisture. Entire cities have been flattened in hours, forcing mass evacuations and costly rebuilding. These events highlight how vulnerable modern societies remain, despite technological advances.

In the context of climate change, wind takes on new significance. Winchester connects shifting wind patterns to rising temperatures, stronger storms, and changing weather extremes. Military leaders, planners, and scientists increasingly recognize that altered wind behavior can destabilize regions, displace populations, and strain resources. At the same time, wind energy represents one of the most promising tools for reducing the very emissions driving these changes. This dual role - both threat and solution - underscores the complexity of humanity’s relationship with the atmosphere.

In conclusion, "The Breath of the Gods: The History and Future of the Wind" by Simon Winchester reveals that wind is far more than a background feature of daily life. It is a force that links distant places, drives ecological and human systems, and shapes both history and the future. From the quiet drift of seeds to the roar of hurricanes, from ancient sails to modern turbines, wind has always been at work. As the climate shifts and societies search for sustainable energy, understanding this invisible power becomes essential. Winchester leaves the reader with a renewed awareness that air, though unseen, is one of the most influential elements on Earth - and that learning to live with it wisely may determine what comes next.

[Lisa · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not what I expected. Pretty boring. There were a few interesting bits but overall I would not recommend.

[Emma · Rating 1 out of 5]

I rarely leave a book unfinished, but the outdated and highly offensive ideas around 'civilised' peoples meant I had to put this down after the Introduction.

It's very easy to refute Winchester's 'indisputable fact' that variable weather is somehow uniquely associated with areas where writing and cities first developed, and this climate determinism argument has been used to justify unimaginable violence and dispossession over hundreds of years. Certainly not what I was expecting from a book (published in 2025, no less) about Earth's winds.

[Cheryl · Rating 3 out of 5]

Humber, Dogger, Malin, Viking, Hebrides, Trafalgar, southeast Iceland, Faroes, Finisterre—mariners would listen keenly to the near-poetic intonations of the announcers, telling them of the expected conditions—Rockall, nine hundred and sixty filling slowly to nine hundred and ninety, westerly Storm Force Ten, backing southwest eight, snow showers becoming rain, poor becoming good—which in this case told a fisherman who was riding the gray swells way to the west of Scotland’s Outer Hebrides that a cyclonic depression was easing, the winds were slowing and backing across the compass to bring in warmer southerly air, the snow was changing to rain, and the visibility from the bridge was likely to improve in the coming hours. He would, in short, soon be a happier skipper.

An interesting and well written story of winds on our planet, blending fact, fiction, science, history, and more, and bringing it all alive. I feel like this author’s writing can be uneven, at times loving his books and others not, or perhaps his writing is getting better as he ages.

One chart showed historical data of storm tracks making their way eastward from the mountainous far west—thick red lines crossing the country from Oregon and California and Arizona and the High Sierra and the deserts of the Great Basin, lines showing their aggregated history as they sped south of the Great Lakes, converging steadily until most were packed together almost as one as they passed right over the New England states, then reached the sudden high mountainous barrier of this, our Presidential Range, and tried to squeeze past the peaks on their way to the sea. But here, Alexandra explained, the Venturi effect kicks in, comes into play, the gales and storms now being compressed between two peaks into a tight corner, and then, as you may recall from school, the wind speed increases and the temperature falls—and hence Mount Washington, with the worst weather in the world.

The underlying reason for my writing this book is the notion, still unformed and so to some a subject of considerable controversy, that wind speeds around the world are falling. That despite hurricanes and cyclones and typhoons becoming ever more violent—and indeed on the very day of this visit, September 28, 2024, a ferocious hurricane named Helene claimed scores of victims in the southern Appalachian Mountains—despite such events, the average wind speeds around the world are inexplicably declining. The world is said by some to be in the grip of what they are calling the Great Stilling. Which may or may not be permanent. Which may or may not be vastly consequential for life on Planet Earth.

The oldest written language in the world is generally now agreed to be Sumerian, forged in the kingdom of Sumer in what is now southeastern Iraq, the origins of which date back to around 3100 BCE—five thousand years ago, during the Bronze Age. The writing is in cuneiform script, patterns of largely wedge-shaped lines that were impressed with a sharpened reed onto tablets of softened and leather-hard clay, eventually baked to ensure their preservation.

A word for wind exists in Sumerian—it is lil. The lexical story of this particular word is a little more complicated, however, since Sumerians, as far as we know, may well have been aware of wind and its effects, yet did not fully understand what caused the air—which was also invisible, of course—to move. There are Sumerian words for other features of the weather—for rain, for clouds, for ice, fog, thunder, and lightning. There is even a cuneiform word for snow, which was not common in Mesopotamia but which certainly occurred once in a while, and the existence of which, together with the challenges it presented to a settled desert people, presumably kept them intellectually on their toes.

And yet this very lexical fact—that wind and its kin were to be written about so early on in the story of humankind, has long been at the heart of a debate about which came first. Did civilized peoples notice the wind and the weather it drew along with it, and write about it? Or did the very existence of the wind and the weather somehow draw such people to those very particular places in which their civilization would grow and flourish and eventually allow them to grow in intellect, to develop systems of writing, and so to record the very phenomenon that drew them there in the first place?
Hawaiian, which is said to have well over six hundred recorded words that can fairly be described as wind-related. The remote island chain in the mid-Pacific is bathed in what were until recently endlessly regular northeasterly trade winds—but so wildly complex is the topography across which these winds blow that all manner of local variations are experienced, and have for centuries past been noted and catalogued by a Hawaiian people with a legendarily profound interest in, knowledge of, and affection for their environment. For every single ahupua’a, or geographically distinct area across the islands, there are three quite different winds—more even than the hundreds of names for rain, and for which Hawaii is already justly famed.

[Socraticgadfly · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars rounded down, rounding down rather than up, even though it's already under 4 stars. The discursiveness, including man-made "wind" being part of it, is why, along with errors.

This guaranteed some sort of 3-star review at best on page 61, when he talked about Bing Crosby writing a song, “The Singing Sands of Alamosa,” actually about the somewhat nearby Great Sand Dunes National Park. The issue? Winchester says in a footnote he was then in Cincinnati and “there being few places of interest in the plains of western Kansas or eastern Colorado to detain the passing stranger, it turned out to be a journey, one very long and full day.”

On matters historical, we’ll start further east of western Kansas. There’s the Gateway Arch National Park, far more than the arch itself, but also including the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial with plenty of historical information in the Arch grounds. There’s the National Frontier Trails Museum in Independence, Missouri, chock full of Santa Fe, Oregon and California trails information. There’s the tourist attraction of Boot Hill in Dodge City, Kansas. There’s Bent’s Fort in southeastern Colorado, a key site for mountain men and other trappers, both Hispanics from Mexico and Anglos coming down the Santa Fe Trail, to trade with southern Plains Indians and which, per the book’s title, can be quite windy. (Later in the book, he talks about the Oklahoma Panhandle town of Willow, with the implication he stopped there, so he contradicts himself, unless he read about the marker there, but he still contradicts himself indirectly, I’d argue. And Tom Cole’s Congressional district does not include the Panhandle)

And, once again, although this time not technically an error of fact, Soy Boy the History Nerd, aka Brendan the Toddler, drives right by this. (He also misses an actual error later; let me not praise him with faint damns, and besides, I haven't called you, and your cult, out in a while.)

As for “The Great Stilling”? Wind speeds are slowing down only on land, and last I checked, water covered 70 percent or more of the planet’s surface.

While ancient Polynesians did not have compasses or sextants, they did use knowledge of ocean swells and birds as well as winds. And, Micronesians, considered a parallel group within Austronesians to Polynesians, today retain knowledge of a stick chart that plots “reflections” of waves and swells. For more, go here. (That said, technically, Austronesians invented the crab claw sail and everything else Winchester mentions before splitting into Micronesian, Polynesian and Melanesian.)

Scotland was not Catholic in 1588. Some Highland clans, yes; the nation, no. James VI (actually his regency) ratified changes that officially established Presbyterianism in 1567. By 1588, it had taken firm root in the Lowlands.

Walter Munk, I’ll admit I’d never heard of before. He surely played a part in the weather success of D-Day, but also surely should still take second place to James Stagg, better known for a reason. So, Munk as “The Man who Delayed D-Day”? Meh. That said, per Wiki, Stagg also gets too much credit, perhaps. Norway’s Sverre Petterssen deserves more accolade, it seems.

I’ll definitely confess to not knowing James Blyth as inventor of the first wind turbine way back in 1887. Charles Brush in the US added a braking mechanism to the general idea a few years later and so gets credit.

As for a half-sneer early in the book about modern Hawaiian Polynesians sailing west (edit) to Africa as part of recreating, or expanding on, old trips, with Winchester naming Ghana? Uhh, Austronesians of some sort sailed west (edit) to colonize Madagascar. (Don't want to perpetuate an error myself with wrong directions!)

And, he falls into 2-star-ish territory with the old, and untrue, claim that we dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in a mix of racism and a shot across the bow of the USSR. The latter is certainly not true. I've talked about this many times, like here. And, the jet streams could have been discussed without this, and the firestorms themselves are human-made "wind." (Side note: I've read Gar Alperovitz and others; do people like Winchester who read the likes of him also read the likes of Frank and Gallucchio?)

[Brian · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read and enjoyed two of Simon Winchester's earlier books. (The Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology and The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary)

This one was a slog. Verbosity, exaggeration, and hyperbole throughout.

He takes 309 words to describe a boy flying a kite:

"The image is an enduring one, seen hundreds of times down the centuries. There is a child—a boy, usually— on a meadow, or better still on a sandy beach with small white horses on the distant waves, and the sky is eggshell blue and chubby white clouds are scudding along it, and between a pair of these clouds is a small, gaily colored kite, diamond-shaped or pear-shaped or an isosceles triangle with its wooden cross members just visible at this distance, and from the point at its lower end comes a pendulous curving tail with maybe small cross tags of colored fabric flying in the breeze to give the kite some stability, with the whole flying affair connected to the boy below with a long, quite taut string that ends in a kind of homemade rudder-like handle that allows the boy, with subtle twists and turns and pulls and releases, to make the kite above him go this way or that or rise and fall or soar and sweep through the gusts and calms and the thermals up high, and
beside the boy is a cluster of awestruck youngsters—cheering schoolfriends most probably—with, notably, a young girl that the kite-flying boy is trying to impress with his skill, and then to complete the picture there is the family dog, or maybe one or two others, and they are each looking up, as is everyone else in the picture, the dogs yapping at the mystery of an object in the near sky being yanked this way and that at the command—made with a very long version of a leash, no less—of the small boy here some hundreds of feet below, secure on the sand or the grass, taking advantage of the wind above to propel his toy toward the heavens. What joy! What amazement! What a sheer, unalloyed burst of fresh-air pleasure!"
And what are "small white horses on the distant waves"?

He also discusses the World War II November 1944 bombing raids on Japan's mainland.:
"It was in November 1944, at the beginning of the American bombing raids on mainland Japan that, by today’s general admission, were cruel and unnecessary and probably classifiable as war crimes, and which sought to devastate an already impoverished, demoralized, and near-defeated nation"

While the later firebombing of Japanese cities is a valid moral discussion, this is wholly false. In the following 7 months Allied casualties in three battles would be 125,623, with 33.325 killed. Civilian deaths in the Philippines and on Okinawa were more than one MILLION. Hardly a "near defeated
nation"

Battles Casualties Killed Wounded
Totals 125,623 33,225 92,398
Philippines 50,434 13,884 36,550
Iwo Jima 26,038 6,821 19,217
Okinawa 49,151 12,520 36,631

Later he describes the post Dust Bowl efforts at planting tree breaks across the Great Plains:
"An eleven-man CCC team would ... " dig the holes and set the saplings in place, secure them to anchors by twine, then tamp down the topsoil and water each infant tree" . He says a team could plant six thousand trees a day - which translates to 11 men working 12 hours and doing ALL that more than 45 TIMES a minute - about 1.3 seconds a tree.

Discussing a ferry sinking in New Zealand in April 1968 he states: "Television had only recently come to New Zealand" - it stared in 1960, not my definition of "Recently"

Disappointing

[Cheryl Gatling]

Simon Winchester, author of about a million nonfiction books, says he was inspired to write a book about wind because he had heard that worldwide, average windspeed was decreasing. It is generally agreed that climate change is contributing to more and stronger storms, with intense winds, but on a day to day basis there may actually be less wind, a phenomenon called global stilling.

The book is noncommittal on this question. Maybe yes, maybe no. But in the process of looking into what’s going on with the wind, Winchester has gone off to explore just about every aspect of wind: historical, cultural, scientific, literary. Here are a few of the things you can learn about in this book:

The introduction of tumbleweeds to the American west (they were accidentally imported from Russia), singing sands and the construction of different shapes of sand dunes, how wind instruments make music, how airplanes fly, how sea travel and sailing developed, which led to explorations and battles, how windmills were used to pump water, to grind grain, and now, to generate power, how the Beaufort scale measures the effects of wind, about cyclones and hurricanes, and tornadoes, about D Day, and the Dust Bowl, and the firebombing of Tokyo, which was spread by its own wind.

There are many fun facts to be learned. One of my favorite is that the Gulf Stream was first discovered by a Japanese named Dr Ooishi, but no one has heard of him because he published his findings in Esperanto, and no one reads Esperanto, so the credit went to someone else.

Another is that Russia tried to keep the nuclear disaster of Chernobyl a secret, but they couldn’t, because the wind blew the fallout west, to Sweden. Sweden said, “Russia, what’s going on over there? All this radiation is coming from you.” Russia said, “Uh, nothing. Everything’s fine.” But, says Winchester, “the wind doesn’t lie.”

Winchester can get very science-y, as he does when describing the Coriolis effect, and the Venturi effect, and even describing the inner workings of a Dutch windmill. But I think he is at his best when telling stories.

He tells about how the winds have changed the outcome of battles and changed the fate of nations. He describes some of the most deadly shipwrecks of history, and how storms flattened whole cities. He tells smaller stories, like how a storm once prevented his company from going bankrupt, because court was closed for one day, long enough for him to get the money together.

If there is a single conclusion, it is probably that wind has been a part of human life on earth since forever, and it is very important, even if we don’t spend much time thinking about it.

[Adam K · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was my first book by author and journalist Simon Winchester, and it will not be my last.

In The Breath of the Gods, Winchester takes us on a whirlwind tour of wind from all kinds of angles. Whether it is how humanity's understanding of wind evolved from early antiquity to the modern scientific age or how wind has affected the course of history, he leaves no stone unturned.

But this is not an academic study of mathematical equations and wind scales (though he discusses them often). This book is more akin to attending the seminar of a speaker whose passion for the subject can't help but rub off on its rapt listeners.

Not only does Winchester explain, in plain English, scientific research into the cause of various winds and wind-related phenomenon, but he also flexes his narrative writing skills by telling stories of what it was like for people whose lives were affected, for better or worse, by the wind. For example, he gives an almost romantic telling of what it must have been like for a sailor who worked the rigging of a ship during the age of sail, painting such a vivid picture as to make such a life seem both nostalgic and terrifying. Another example is his multiple retellings of what it was like for people who survived hurricanes and their accompanying storms with sharp, horrifying detail.

This book is organized by wind speed, starting from light breezes and concluding with tornadoes. Now, at the end of the book, I find this organizational decision to be almost whimsical. Winchester has very "professor regaling his class with a fascinating and relevant story" vibes, and I loved it. He drifts from topic to topic in a way that is very much in the same vein as the likes of Bill Bryson. The sheer number of fun facts and downright fascinating stories was more than enough to satisfy my interests and keep me engaged. There were even some topics touched upon that I will likely seek to learn more about independently, which is always a bonus to me when reading books like this.

If any of that sounds interesting to you, I highly recommend this book.