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The Breath of the Gods: The History and Future of the Wind
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 2022, 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.
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 2022, 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.
413 pages, Kindle Edition
First published November 18, 2025
122 people are currently reading
6846 people want to read
About the author
Simon Winchester
90 books2,301 followersSimon 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
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
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
October 18, 2025
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.)
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.)
November 30, 2025
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.
November 26, 2025
At some point we’re going to need to stage an intervention with Simon Winchester. The man has already written definitive histories of dictionaries, maps, precision engineering, the Pacific Ocean, land itself, and the entire concept of human knowledge. Now he’s written a book about wind. Just wind. And the maddening part? It’s terrific.
Winchester’s perfected a particular magic trick: taking subjects you’d politely nod through at a dinner party and turning them into books you stay up too late reading. You will learn about tumbleweed. You will learn about the aerodynamics of maple seeds. You will find yourself emotionally invested in the history of the anemometer. This is not a drill.
He roams from the trade winds that powered empires to the firestorms of World War II, from the murderous gales off Cape Horn to the promise--and problems--of modern wind energy. He wanders through it all like a man on a long country walk with no agenda and an encyclopedic mind: here’s Chernobyl, now napalm, now the doldrums.
Do the early chapters include some throat-clearing atmospheric physics? Yes. Push through. The payoff is worth it: shipwrecks, forgotten characters, and prose vivid enough to make you feel ice forming on the rigging.
Winchester will probably write a book about dust next. I will read it immediately.
Winchester’s perfected a particular magic trick: taking subjects you’d politely nod through at a dinner party and turning them into books you stay up too late reading. You will learn about tumbleweed. You will learn about the aerodynamics of maple seeds. You will find yourself emotionally invested in the history of the anemometer. This is not a drill.
He roams from the trade winds that powered empires to the firestorms of World War II, from the murderous gales off Cape Horn to the promise--and problems--of modern wind energy. He wanders through it all like a man on a long country walk with no agenda and an encyclopedic mind: here’s Chernobyl, now napalm, now the doldrums.
Do the early chapters include some throat-clearing atmospheric physics? Yes. Push through. The payoff is worth it: shipwrecks, forgotten characters, and prose vivid enough to make you feel ice forming on the rigging.
Winchester will probably write a book about dust next. I will read it immediately.
December 28, 2025
Readable, resonant, and quietly unsettling in all the right ways. Winchester takes a force we treat as background noise — wind — and turns it into a protagonist with history, agency, and mood. This is creative nonfiction at its most inviting: complex ideas distilled into clear, memorable stories without losing their scientific backbone.
What impressed me most is how he frames atmospheric science as a kind of planetary biography. Concepts like the “Great Stilling” aren’t just explained; they’re contextualized, mythologized, and made emotionally legible. Winchester has a gift for taking sprawling, interdisciplinary material and shaping it into something that feels both intimate and vast.
The book leans pop‑science rather than technical climatology, but that’s part of its charm. It’s the kind of nonfiction that sparks curiosity rather than closing the conversation. I found myself pausing to look up terms, trace his sources, and follow the threads he lays down — not because the text is unclear, but because it opens doors.
If you enjoy narrative science, atmospheric history, or books that make you rethink the invisible architecture of the world around you, this is a rewarding, surprisingly immersive read.
Thank you to the publisher and Goodreads for the Print Galley ARC that I read.
What impressed me most is how he frames atmospheric science as a kind of planetary biography. Concepts like the “Great Stilling” aren’t just explained; they’re contextualized, mythologized, and made emotionally legible. Winchester has a gift for taking sprawling, interdisciplinary material and shaping it into something that feels both intimate and vast.
The book leans pop‑science rather than technical climatology, but that’s part of its charm. It’s the kind of nonfiction that sparks curiosity rather than closing the conversation. I found myself pausing to look up terms, trace his sources, and follow the threads he lays down — not because the text is unclear, but because it opens doors.
If you enjoy narrative science, atmospheric history, or books that make you rethink the invisible architecture of the world around you, this is a rewarding, surprisingly immersive read.
Thank you to the publisher and Goodreads for the Print Galley ARC that I read.
November 25, 2025
everything you wanted to know about the wind
Like many of his previous books, Simon Winchester spins an enjoyable story about wind. Why it occurs, where it occurs, how it has influenced human history and our progress. He retains the amazing ability to weave together the science, history, the references to how it has impacted humanity throughout history. He includes many interesting anecdotes and personal experiences that altogether make the book educational, relatable, informative and enjoyable. I would highly recommend it.
Like many of his previous books, Simon Winchester spins an enjoyable story about wind. Why it occurs, where it occurs, how it has influenced human history and our progress. He retains the amazing ability to weave together the science, history, the references to how it has impacted humanity throughout history. He includes many interesting anecdotes and personal experiences that altogether make the book educational, relatable, informative and enjoyable. I would highly recommend it.
December 12, 2025
The Breath of the Gods is a delightful, thought-provoking journey through a force we often take for granted. Its greatest strength lies in making something invisible tangible—showing how wind has guided explorers, shaped civilizations, inspired scientists, and continues to influence our planet’s future. Readers who enjoy narrative science, environmental history, and wide-ranging essays will find much to savor here. At its best, Winchester’s book reminds us that even the air we cannot see has a history—and perhaps a destiny—worth understanding.
November 26, 2025
Your narrative style is beautifully visual, every scene feels like it’s been composed rather than just written. It’s cinematic, emotional, and alive.
As a commissioned artist who makes comics and webtoons, I couldn’t help but imagine how naturally this story would translate into illustrated form.
You’re always welcome to reach out on Instagram (@eve_verse_) or Discord (bennett_lol) if that ever interests you.
As a commissioned artist who makes comics and webtoons, I couldn’t help but imagine how naturally this story would translate into illustrated form.
You’re always welcome to reach out on Instagram (@eve_verse_) or Discord (bennett_lol) if that ever interests you.
December 20, 2025
Gemini: Stepping Stone to the Moon by Jeffrey Kluger is a thrilling, behind-the-scenes look at the pioneering Gemini program that made the moon landing possible. Packed with heroism, setbacks, and rivalry, Kluger brings to life the daring astronauts and brilliant minds whose perseverance paved the way for Apollo and changed space exploration forever.
December 29, 2025
There were moments I liked a lot, especially when the book zoomed out and let wind shape history instead of explaining it. But it kept slipping back into explanation mode, and that’s where I started drifting. I wanted more awe, less instruction. More feeling the wind, less being told what it means
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Nice book
Review of advance copy received from Goodreads Giveaways
Good
November 21, 2025
this was good! that being said i read it as research for a tornado script i'm writing. this book has a tornado on the cover. tornados are not discussed until the last 10 pages. womp.
November 26, 2025
Wow can Simon Winchester write. Anyone who can make a book about wind so enthralling it a true master.
December 1, 2025
Another satisfying and enjoyable book from Mr. Winchester. This one about wind, of all things.
December 2, 2025
Wonderful read for any sailor. I loved the description of the development of the Beaufort scale, and appreciated how accessible the descriptions of the development of hurricanes and tornadoes.
Read
December 6, 2025This should have been a Planet Earth episode with David Attenborough… I needed visuals.
December 8, 2025
read it now
A great learning experience, beautifully written. I will continue to search out his books and read the ones I can find on kindle.
A great learning experience, beautifully written. I will continue to search out his books and read the ones I can find on kindle.
December 9, 2025
Another gem from Simon Winchester. Only he could write an interesting book entirely about wind.
December 13, 2025
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.
December 14, 2025
An excellent book - Simon Winchester is a master at combining history and the sciences into a compelling narrative!
December 18, 2025
3.5 stars
December 28, 2025
Not what I expected. Pretty boring. There were a few interesting bits but overall I would not recommend.
December 14, 2025
4.5*
Sings in the final chapters with a rush to squeeze in all the wayward connectables to a stiff breeze (I’m hooked on maritime disasters and tornados).
Rtc.
Sings in the final chapters with a rush to squeeze in all the wayward connectables to a stiff breeze (I’m hooked on maritime disasters and tornados).
Rtc.
Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews